Re: the best Linux for me

From: Christian Lynbech (christian_at_defun.dk)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 13:02:53 +0100

>>>>> "Christopher" == Christopher C Stacy <cstacy@news.dtpq.com> writes:

Christopher> What's Debian's package / distro system called?

The package system (the one that is equivalent to rpm) is DPKG (Debian
Packager, I guess). One uses the `dpkg' tool to install and remove
packages (extension is .deb).

Apt is a collection of tools to bring packages onto the machine. The
tool 'apt-get' is a commandline tool that knows about Debian archives
available over the net or on CD or whatever; the tool 'aptitude' is a
ncurses frontend that allows you to browse the different sections and
read package descriptions and so on.

Christopher> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?

For ordinary package maintenance, I don't think that rpm is that much
worse than dpkg. The fact that I have a terrible time remembering what
options to use to do anything usefull is not really rpm's fault, I
think :-)

There may be some internal mechanism sort of problems in either one of
the systems relating to dependency management, version guards and the
like, but it is not something I know of or I think is experienced in
real life.

The qualities of the various packages are a whole different ballgame
of course. My impression (and note here that I am a many year Debian
fan) is that most of the commercial distributions works rather well
for the stuff that is part of each release, but the amount of software
available in a typical SuSE or RedHat release is miniscule compared to
all that is in Debian unstable and the average quality of a package in
Debian unstable is much higher than the average quality of add-on
software to the rpm based distros.

Indicative of these differences is that a commercial distro typically
chooses one variant of a tool, say GNU Emacs or Xemacs, and only fully
support that. Then add-ons such as the GNUS newsreader or ILISP either
works only for one or isn't available at all. In Debian there is a
wealth of add-ons and both for Emacs and Common Lisp and there is an
infrastructure that attempts to allow different runtime environments
to coexist. Thus you can, with Debian, install both CMUCL, SBCL and
PPCRE and have PPCRE work automatically in both environments.

------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)

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