When I switched around Red Hat 6 (not RHEL 6), the difference in quality of uninstall scripts and dependency management was stark: you can install and uninstall

When I switched around Red Hat 6 (not RHEL 6), the difference in quality of uninstall scripts and dependency management was stark: you can install and uninstall Debian packages without changes to your system. They test for this. If you need to tweak source, you can get build dependencies with one command, source with another, and build and install from your tweaked version with just one more.