On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 01:08:04AM +0200, Martin F. Krafft wrote: > i must admit that i am not particularly down with RPM, but the time > that i had to use it i remember as horrible.
> in fact, AFAIK, RPM surely provide dependencies, but DEB has more - > suggestions, and best of all, classes (i.e. MTA). Ok, I am not quite sure whether RPM has any support for suggestions, which are nice, but the class support is there, but not very widely used. I see it mostly as a policy issue, though. > but i used to hate RPMs -- not least because of their non-intuitive > command line syntax and other weirdities. e.g. dpkg -l <package> > works beautifully whereas with RPMs, you needed to rpm -qa | grep > <package>, which i think is ridiculous. Well, command line syntaxes most definitely are a matter of taste. While I agree that rpm command line syntax from time to time is illogical (--oldpackage vs. --replacepkgs -- why is the latter abbreviated if the previous is not. Impossible to remember...), your specific example is the single point where I long for RPM. rpm -q <package> tells whether a specific package is installed. rpm -qi <package> gives info about the package, -ql lists the files and so on. dpkg -l <package>, however, gives a nasty, bastardized formatted output, which always seems to truncate version numbers in the middle. Furthermore I've never been able to find a way to see the description of an installed package on the command line. Though it's just me, I'm sure. :-) > DEB, along with apt-get and dselect and what not was love at first > sight for me, and i would never even dream about doing it differently > anymore... Apt-get, while developed for Debian, is already used on several RPM-based distributions (Conectiva, Mandrake) as well, so it is not really a packaging format issue. ... although I miss it every single second when maintaining any Red Hat server at work... The point I'm trying to make is, that while dpkg is in itself a viable and good package format (which I personally DO prefer over rpm), some conformance is good. As it is now, Debian is in danger of getting isolated, especially in commercial environments. > cross-compatibility is needed, but rather than surrendering and > converting to RPM, it should be the community's goal to establish DEB > at least to be a second standard, causing vendors and distributors to > package with DEB as well as RPM. I think that might be an unrealistic goal. I think it's better to embrace and extend, i.e. to provide a toolset to transparently install rpm packages with 'alien' and 'dpkg' on a dpkg based distribution. Regards, -- Matti Airas GGL, CISU, CMS, ERV, Abdurahmon, snullen, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reprieve, Crypto AG, Secure Internet +358 50 34 64 256 Connections, Skytel, mindwar, MI6, GAFE, http://www.iki.fi/mairas/ CDC, Verisign, Yucca Mountain, Yakima, BSS,