Do we need this crap on LWN?

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 25, 2007 8:50 UTC (Sun) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182)
In reply to: Do we need this crap on LWN? by evgeny
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

> Even if true (though I've yet to see anybody stating it on oath) this
> would be absolutely insufficient to justify its existence - given that
> apt-get existed prior to RPM emergence.

I am a Debian developer but I am responding in defence of RPM, go figure ;-). First, apt-get did not pre-date RPM. Second, apt-get cannot be directly compared to rpm. rpm package equivalent is a deb package and rpm binary equivalent is dpkg utility. apt-get operates at a level higher than dpkg and automatically handles dependencies among other things. Connectiva ported apt-get to rpm and I prefer it over yum to administer the odd Redhat machine we have at work.

As a format, there's not really much to choose between rpm and deb. They both work well. In fact, there is a consistency in rpm command line that I like better than dpkg (for e.g. dpkg --listfiles and dpkg --contents vs rpm -ql and rpm -qlp). I also like the fact that source rpms are also rpms.

Why redhat invented yum when apt-get was already out there is still a mystery to me. However, yum or apt-get is still not the real issue. Even debian apt-get has trouble mixing and matching many repositories. I have had trouble installing some packages from Ubuntu universe/multiverse because the packages in those repositories don't meet the high standards of the code. The real issue is the quality of the underlying packages and the number of available packages.

And _that_ gentlemen is where Debian really shines. Debian is extremely anal about getting even the most trivial details in a package right. If you make the smallest typo/grammar mistake in your package description you get a bug. If you get your dependencies wrong, or doesn't handle upgrades correctly that's a severe bug. It's this attention to detail and the availability of all the packages in the core that makes Debian a winner.

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