On Sat, May 20, 2000 at 07:07:00PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote: > Previously Keith G. Murphy wrote: > > I must say, my subjective experience has been that rpm's are much faster > > to install something. Of course, it's also faster to throw my clothes > > on the floor, rather than put them in the hamper... > > That is a result of the fact that rpm uses a binary database for its > data, while dpkg uses a large number of text-files instead. The > advantage of that is that it is robust (if a single file gets corrupted > it's not much of a problem), and that it is possible to fix or modify > things by hand using a normal text editor if needed.
this is a tremendous advantage of dpkg, it should never be changed to use a binary database. the human readable/editable dpkg database has saved me from having to reinstall a system from scratch when the /var partition was destroyed and had to be restored with a slightly out of date backup. dpkg was broken due to the inconsistent databases but it only took a little bit of editing to fix it. redhat dists on the other hand are said to be un-upgradable because the binary databases become corrupted so easy. (see archives of the linux-config mailing list for this) > Apt uses a mixed approach: it uses the same textfiles as dpkg but > uses a binary cache to also get the advantages of a binary database. it does? where? -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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