This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Debian or RPM? From: Jason Costomiris <jcostom@jasons.org> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 15:16:33 -0500 On Wed, Dec 29, 1999 at 01:52:18PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote: : This is the sort of question that generates a lot of traffic (or none) but : probably isn't answerable. Red Hat's package management system (RPM) was : an innovation that I think a lot of people (especially on this list) : appreciate. But Debian has it's own package management system and many : non-RH distos use RPM now. There are certain VERY useful features that dpkg offers that RPM doesn't. Take for example, the /etc/alternatives directory that's present in Debian. Suppose you have 5 machines, and want to use a shared, NFS mounted /usr filesystem. On the fileserver, you might have emacs 19, 20, and xemacs 20 installed. All of the Debian packages will install with names like /usr/bin/emacs19 /usr/bin/emacs20 /usr/bin/xemacs20 and /usr/bin/emacs -> /etc/alternatives/emacs In the /etc/alternatives directory is a bunch of symlinks that point to the actual program you would like to choose out of /usr/bin. That's cool, and extremely handy. === Subject: Re: Debian or RPM? From: Joe Brenner <doom@kzsu.Stanford.EDU> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 15:27:17 -0800 Frank Rocco <frocco@earthlink.net> wrote: > I'm a linux newbie and purchased Corel Linux and RH 6.1 > What is the difference between the debian based over RH? I am and remain a redhat user, but one of the reasons I would look at the Debian distribution is because of the package management system. They've essentially solved the problem of automatic security upgrades over the net (which strikes me as *the* critical security technology... most crackers are using known exploits that still exist only because the sysadmin hasn't gotten to installing the fix). There are a number of things that annoy me about using RPMs (e.g. nearly *every* time you try and install something, there's some problem with dependencies that you have to resolve semi-manually... This is another thing that the debian folks claim to have solved already). My expectation is that the RPM folks will add these features eventually (I wouldn't be suprised if they're very close already), but if I needed them immediately, I'd switch to Debian. If you're worried about career options... well, Redhat certainly seems to have the publicity and the momentum to be a safe choice for the near future. Depending on what you're interested in doing, you could argue that learning FreeBSD is a better choice (a lot of old-time Unix heads prefer it for servers, for example). It *is* true that Debian has been more conservative about changing C-libraries, but on the other hand upgrading from RedHat 5.x to 6.x was hell in my opinion. When Debian gets around to doing the switch maybe it'll go eaisier for them. RedHat's tendency to ship beta (or sub-beta) quality stuff isn't really a selling point in my book. ===