> ".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the

> ".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the packager." > -- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2. Here you have a point. That's a fairly silly requirement. However, the rest of the recommendations in the second link are pretty solid. > I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here? No, it's a policy/politics thing. Gems break the FHS, so Debian pretends they don't exist. Not knowing it intimately, I don't know Fedora's approach precisely, but presumably they're either allowing FHS breakage, or patching the gems to bring them into line. Patching them is a non-small job; the number of badly-written gems out there is astounding. I say this as someone peripherally involved with patching them to make them conform to Debian's standards. > (Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".) That's a shame - the limitations of Rails are not an accurate representation of the limitations of the language.