[plug] The Debian Experience

[Craig Ringer]

> The only semi-official standards base has declared RPM to be the 'linux 
> standard'.

Well, only in that to be LSB compliant the distro must be able to 
install RPMs. There is no requirement that it use RPM as its package 
manager - only be able to install RPMs. Alien is considered quite ok - 
as per an interview I read the other day with one of the LSB guys, anway.

> Debian will never switch, declaring that apt is better. Everyone 
> here knows that it is, but bad luck.

dpkg has its problems. Perl being #1 and iffy error handling being #2. 
Got to say that I wouldn't mind working with RPM as a back-end instead 
of dpkg, though perhaps that means I haven't used an RPM based distro in 
too long. A "debian-rpm" would need a few extensions on the dependency 
info etc to be as info-rich as dpkg, but I'm sure that could be managed.

Apt != dpkg. Apt also has issues but is _really_ nice IMHO. I'd have 
nothing against apt-rpm if done properly, the real issue is the quality 
of the packaging of most RPM distros.

-- 
Craig Ringer
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