The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

>Apt is faster and seems to be smarter about complicated updates

Apt misses some dependencies sometimes - at least this has been my motivation to switch to
"smart".

>Your editor's system currently has 106 .rpmnew files, 41 .rpmsave files, and 103 .rpmorig
files under /etc; your editor has no clue about what changes might be indicated by any of
them.

.rpmnew: The author of the RPM package decided that the configuration file in question --
possibly modified by the user -- is better left as-is (%config(noreplace) in the spec file).
This is the case with e.g. smb.conf, where you certainly would not want the defaults to come
back. Instead, the defaults are put into smb.conf.rpmnew.

.rpmorig: The author of the RPM package decided that the configuration file in question is
safe to overwrite (%config in the specfile) -- but at least keeps a copy of the user's
changes. This is the case with /etc/wgetrc and all the obscure stuff in /etc/gnome you
normally never touch in your regular life.

.rpmsave: This happens when you remove the RPM package and the file in question is tagged
%config or %config(noreplace), and was modified by the user. In case someday you reinstall the
package, your old settings (e.g. smb.conf again) are retained until you manually delete them
or put them back into place.

It's all sane.

>Ubuntu, true to its Debian roots, halts the update process and asks the administrator what to
do. Except, on occasion, where it just silently replaces some vital configuration file with a
non-working version.

...which never happens with rpm (assuming the spec file was properly written). Also, rpm is
designed for non-interactivity, so we can't just ask people questions. I agree that you could
whack up something with isatty(), but let's better not.

>In general, Debian-based systems have traditionally been seen as being easier to update -
especially from remote repositories - than RPM-based systems.

RPM does not need the funny dpkg --purge thing, for one.

>With regard to the variety of packages available, Ubuntu used to have a huge lead. When the
full set of universe repositories is used, this Debian-based distribution still offers more
packages than Rawhide does. 

Sometimes, smaller is better. The ever-increasing number of packages per repository bloats the
metadata files and makes YourFavoritePackageManager slower in processing. Splitting up
repositories into categories (example: opensuse.org/repositories/) is a good idea IMHO.