Why I'm using Fedora [LWN.net]

Why I'm using Fedora

Posted May 6, 2004 12:51 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Why I'm using Fedora by angdraug
Parent article: Revealed: how Fedora and the community interact

I'm not sure what debhelper does (help automate package construction?), but there is an 'rpmlint' that at least catches the aggregious errors in your .spec files.

The concept behind SRPMs is that it is entierely self-contained; everything that goes into the final package is found inside the SRPM; no external files (save the build dependencies) are needed. And SRPMs can include an effectilvely arbitrary number of individial "source" and "patch" files.

Your version control problem sounds more like an artifact of how you create and maintain packages rather than anything inherent to the packaging format; after all keeping old version of .dpkgs wholly intact is going to create much the same repository scope as .[s]rpms, eh?

Debian's advantages over everything else stem from three things -- policy, policy, policy. From a technical aspect (eg dpkg vs rpm) however, things are pretty much level, with strengths and weaknesses stemming from the slated goals of the distribution.

I personally use RH/FC because I have to do the least amount of work to get the system set up and running how I like -- and the majority of said work is always working around the boneheaded policies of the distro. So naturally I chose the distro whose inherent boneheadedness maps the closest to mine.

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Why I'm using Fedora

Posted May 6, 2004 13:50 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

I'm not sure what debhelper does (help automate package construction?)

Yes. Automates tens of different package construction tasks, from manpage installation to X font registration or calculation of Perl dependencies.

The concept behind SRPMs is that it is entierely self-contained; everything that goes into the final package is found inside the SRPM; no external files (save the build dependencies) are needed. And SRPMs can include an effectilvely arbitrary number of individial "source" and "patch" files.

Same applies to a Debian source package: debianization patch can include arbitrary number of individual source and patch files. The only difference is that instead of one file you have a pair of files, which is, once again, entirely self-contained.

Your version control problem sounds more like an artifact of how you create and maintain packages rather than anything inherent to the packaging format; after all keeping old version of .dpkgs wholly intact is going to create much the same repository scope as .[s]rpms, eh?

Please, do your homework before making comments like this one, it exposes that you didn't actually take a look at the Debian packaging system, as I've suggested in my previous comment. Or else you would have at least noticed that binary packages in Debian have .deb extension ;-)

As to our version control problem, we don't need to keep old versions of binary packages, we can reconstruct them from source packages anytime, given that we still keep the latter around. From the other hand, we can't just put the whole damn Linux distro into SCM, it's even more disk space and we only want to maintain a small part of it ourselves.