Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review

Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:44 UTC (Mon) by fest3er (guest, #60379)
In reply to: Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review by BrucePerens
Parent article: Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review

It still isn't.

Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review

Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:55 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (6 responses)

That's not an argument, it's only contradiction.

Can you come up with a technical reason? "I'm used to it" doesn't really qualify. IMO we could have distributed Debian in RPM form and only package makers would even have noticed, and them not so much. We've had machine translation between formats for more than a decade.

Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review

Posted Apr 5, 2010 9:31 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

in that case, why not kill of rpm?

Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review

Posted Apr 5, 2010 10:49 UTC (Mon) by klbrun (subscriber, #45083) [Link]

I'm not expert enough in packaging to have an opinion, but I did come across this discussion: http://lwn.net/Articles/223173/. I work with Red Hat and have come across some "interesting" technical issues; I look forward to the next release of RHEL 6, which is rumored to finally catch up with the Linux distro. My prejudice is to trust Debian's fundamentalism over Red Hat's corporate orientation.

As for my remark about switching to RPM being a hit to the developer community, I was referring to the change itself, since that means new tool chains, etc., rather than the merits of the respective systems.

.deb vs .rpm

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:03 UTC (Thu) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (3 responses)

Clarification: we have machine translation between .rpm and .deb in the sense that we have machine translation between English and Chinese: i.e. no exact translation between them is possible in general, each format has capabilities that the other lacks: see e.g. http://debian-br.sourceforge.net/txt/alien.html (which is now a little out of date e.g. .deb now supports signatures and triggers though some of the differences remain).

.deb vs .rpm

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:23 UTC (Thu) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (2 responses)

Update: See http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ for a newer version of that comparison, along with comments from its author suggesting that the table is commonly misunderstood: so we should be careful with any conclusions we might draw from the table.

.deb vs .rpm

Posted Apr 8, 2010 17:06 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

The author took that down...

.deb vs .rpm

Posted Apr 13, 2010 1:36 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link]

He took down the generated HTML page (and replaced it with text describing the table as much-misunderstood etc.), but the comparison is still there in source form. Despite such qualifications, I think it at least good enough to establish that the machine translation for ten years claim is only true in the sense of lossy translation.