Do we need this crap on LWN? [LWN.net]

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 11:14 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774)
In reply to: Do we need this crap on LWN? by gilboa
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

You confuse the choice of _applications_ with multiple incompatible _standards_. The latter is devil - which everyone in a sane mind knows (besides MS and, apparently, you). "Firefox, Epiphany and Konq" are fine as far as they don't invent HTML extensions. IE, on the other hand, is known for doing exactly that. And so whoever decided to invent RPM when deb was already there, should be similarly ashamed. I don't believe RH will switch to deb now - it's too late, but a gross mistake remains a gross mistake. And I strongly believe the reason was only to distancing from Debian in any possible way. At a much later time, when the choice was whether to go yum or apt-rpm, they picked the inferior (can't say now, but certainly by then) yum. Same reason.

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deb "wasn't already there" to be used.

Posted Feb 22, 2007 15:36 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> And so whoever decided to invent RPM when deb was already there, should be similarly ashamed.

I'm having a hard time finding actual dates, but from what I can find out:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-deta...

dpkg was developed during 1994, but the first "public" release of debian with dpkg didn't happen until March 1995 -- 0.93r5.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History

RPM was first used in RHL 2.0 Beta, publically released in the summer of 1995 but the immediate predecessor of RPM (RPP) became publically available in RHL 0.9 on October 1994. PMS was another package system that was used in the BOGUS distribution, and the brains behind RPP and PMS merged the best of both to create PM then RPM shortly afterwards.

So while technically Debian/dpkg was publically available before RHL/RPM, dpkg "wasn't already there" to be used when RHL1.0/RPP (and PMS) was released, nor while RPM was being developed.

Using your logic, "whoever decided to invent dpkg when RPP and PMS were already there should be similarly ashamed."

deb "wasn't already there" to be used.

Posted Feb 22, 2007 18:00 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

> So while technically Debian/dpkg was publically available before RHL/RPM, dpkg "wasn't already there" to be used when RHL1.0/RPP (and PMS) was released, nor while RPM was being developed.

I really don't know whether RPP should count (i.e., how sophisticated it was), especially given that RPM wasn't backward compatible to it (then you can also count the primitive package management system used by Debian in 1993 and still get a one year off).