Less zelotism, please

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 22, 2004 8:05 UTC (Fri) by walles (subscriber, #954)
In reply to: Less zelotism, please by X-Nc
Parent article: Ubuntu Linux and the future of Debian

The package management system for Debian is in no way any better than the package management system for, say, Fedora. The differences between the DEB and RPM formats are negligible and both can use apt & yum to manage their packages.

Something that you don't acknowledge is the vast amount of packages available for Debian, and that there's one central repository that effectively works as a normalizer for the Debian derivatives.

This makes it a lot more likely on Debian (and its derivatives) than on Redhat (and its derivatives) that:

1. A package you're looking for is available in the default repository.
2. If not, a package that will work fine on your system is available in another repository that can simply be added to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
3. If not, a standalone package that will work fine on your system is available for download from somewhere else.

So it's not just about the file format and the infrastructure, it's what's being done with it.

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