On Sun, 12 Oct 1997, jeff covey wrote:
> i have no desire to start a distribution holy war, but there seem to
> be two competing packaging formats now, rpm (redhat) and debian
> (uh... debian), both of them gpl'ed. someone else will have to speak
> for debian, as i don't know anything about it.
Debian's .deb files are pretty similar to RedHat's .rpm; I've even heard
that RPMs are a variant of the .deb format. RedHat and RPM has definitely
become the dominant distribution and package format for Linux (everyone else
in my local LUG uses RedHat exclusively), but so far I've stuck with Debian.
I like the fact that it's assembled by individuals rather than a company,
and though I have qualms with the package selection interface tool (packages
are grouped into categories similar to the ones you'd listed for RPM, maybe
even identical categories, I'd have to check), the newest version of Debian
seems to be very easy to install and the package maintenence is great -- it
has full dependency support, package removal is easy, and you can even
upgrade a package while the current package is running! It can also read and
install RPMs; don't know for sure but I bet the reverse is true for RedHat.
email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright (c) 1997 Michael Stutz; this information is
<http://dsl.org/m/> free and may be reproduced under GNU GPL, and as long
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