RPMs and DEBs - what do you think?

[aero-z]

Hello,

I've read a lot about "I don't like rpm package management", "DEB rules" etc. What's the story behind this? What's the difference between debs and rpms? To me they're both just packages - one for debian based systems and one for redhat based systems.
Are all rpm related package managers slow like yum?
Could someone clarify these things a little bit?

[markkuk]

You're correct, they are just different types of packages for different distros. It's just the usual "my distro is cooler than yours" type childish arguing.

[tomcat]

Yupp, deb and rpm are just packages. That's all. And no, not all package managers work with the same speed as yum. There are e.g. smart, apt-rpm or urpmi apart from yum for managing packages and the speed is very different. apt-rpm is quite fast, smart is no slower than apt-get, urpmi can be slow (with full hdlist download) or very fast (configured with compressed index). Downloading and installing is fast with all package managers, the only thing that is different is the syncing speed to mirrors. Fedoras yum synchronizes partically always with the mirrors (except you use yum -C), apt-get, smart or urpmi do it only when you tell them to do so.

[Jman]

Speed is one reason apt-get users have tried to get apt to work with rpms.

[martin.sourada]

If I read about comparing Debian to RH/Fedora I nearly always read something like yum is useless, rpm dependency hell. Why? .debs has no dependencies? If they have why we read about dependency hell only when talk about RH/Feodra rpms not about debs? I too think they're only packages. What is so different between debs and rpms?

But, on the other hand, yum is really fat. It could and should use less resources than now and be a little faster...

[RedFedora]

Going back a few years, there weren't many (any?) popular rpm package
managers for RedHat (and derived) systems. Installing rpm packages
usually required manually solving dependancies. Since third party
packages tended to be a bit scattered and short on documentation,
this would often lead to dependancy (rpm) hell. A person could spend
hours searching for rpm files which are now found in seconds with yum,
automatically.

As I understand, Debian has had apt-get for quite a few years now. So
dependancy hell hasn't applied as much to Debian based distros as it
has to Red Hat based oned. That being said, the playing field seems
fairly level now.

So, from an end-users view, there is virtually no difference between
.deb files for Debian and .rpm files for Fedora. However, I find building
.deb files takes more time and effort than putting together a rpm spec file.

I hope this helps a little.