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Fedora 19 Released
hypnosec writes "The Fedora Project has officially announced the release of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' today. New features for the open source distribution include the developer's assistant, which accelerates development efforts by providing templates, samples and toolchains for a different languages; OpenShift Origin, which allows easy building of Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; node.js; Ruby 2.0.0; MariaDB; Checkpoint & Restore, which allows users to checkpoint and restore processes; and OpenLMI, which makes remote management of machines simpler. The distribution also packs GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspace 4.10 and MATE Desktop 1.6."
Thank you for your very lengthy and detailed comparison of Ubuntu and Debian VS Fedora, it has enlightened us in countless ways! I think we can hereby declare Ubuntu and Debian as superior to Fedora, at once. Case closed!
No, it isn't true. Package formats are simple things, indeed. It's really just a tarball with some metadata.
What is still arguably true is that Debian has a wider range of packages than just about any other distro, and Debian also has extremely stringent policies about ensuring upgrade paths and avoiding dependency problems and the like. If you run one of the more stable incarnations of Debian and don't cheat by using external repositories or grabbing packages before they make it through the testing process, you will probably experience fewer packaging problems than on virtually any other distro. But this has nothing at all to do with the package *format*, very little to do with the packaging *tools*, and everything to do with the *package maintenance process*. If Debian used RPM, that would still hold true; if Fedora used .deb, it would still hold true.
Years and years and years ago it was true that RPM-based distros did not have dependency solving package managers with all the capabilities of apt. They do now, and have done for many years. But no community RPM-based distro has packaging policies as robust as the ones applied against the stable branches of Debian (RHEL's are very similar, though, within the same constraints - stick with the official RHEL repos and update channels, no cheating), so they still tend to have a few more cases where a maintainer makes a mistake with a dependency in an update or whatever, and this has led to the eternal life of the 'RPM is inferior to deb' meme, when that's not actually the issue at all.
It would not make sense for a distro like Fedora to be as stringent with packaging policies as stable Debian is, simply because of the differing goals and timeframes involved. But we have been working to make things better, consistently, and the rate of occurrence of packaging errors in modern Fedora is I think significantly lower than it used to be, especially if you don't use the 'updates-testing' repository where updates are validated before being sent to the stable 'updates' repository. (Though we much appreciate it if you *do* enable updates-testing on a testbed machine, and help us to test the updates and catch errors in them before they go to the stable updates repository).