Improving .deb

Posted Jun 6, 2019 8:55 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Improving .deb by amacater
Parent article: Improving .deb

> You can't do that with rpms - and anyway "whose version of rpm" - I'm old enough to remember when Red Hat broke rpm such that you couldn't install updates, when Mandriva introduced a "newer" version of rpm that was a fork by an erstwhile maintainer, that OpenSUSE rpms don't work well with anyone else's.

> Debian's strict policy on packaging and upgrades is what makes seamless upgrade from say, Debian 7 to Debian 9 remotely possible: if you're _really_ lucky, you might just be able to upgrade CentOS 6.8 to 7 or 7.6 to 8 but the rpm world is a reinstall to fix every problem.

What you miss here, is that (afaik) all distros that use deb are DERIVATIVES of debian, so they inherited debian's packaging rules.

OpenSUSE (at least its parent) PREDATES rpm, heck iirc it even predates Red Hat, so while it adopted the rpm program and file format, it already had its own, completely different, packaging rules.

Things are a lot better on that front now, I believe ...

(SuSE began as a Slackware derivative, then was derived from some other obscure distro, then became its own master.)

Cheers,
Wol

Improving .deb

Posted Jun 6, 2019 19:42 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, sorry, I didn't mention Jurix and so on that became SUSE. Every distribution I've seen adopt RPM - back to and including Linux-FT version 2 - has botched it. Red Hat botched it a couple of times where updates became impossible.

Deb "just works" but only because Debian puts a whole lot of policy in place and developers are constrained to work so that packages co-install, don't overwrite libraries from other packages and so on. It's hard nosed packaging policy that makes it work. [A colleague says "CentOS just downloads it's easy - Debian's too big!" but that's because Debian includes the world and its source ]

Improving .deb

Posted Jun 6, 2019 20:50 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> It's hard nosed packaging policy that makes it work.

I agree with that view. That has nothing to do with the format of the archive. It is much more higher level.

>"CentOS just downloads it's easy - Debian's too big!"

Not sure what that means. Net installation works just fine in either.