4 ms·

When RedHat decides to switch to DEB

by raikage 13y ago

SEJeff 13y ago
And why would Reshat want to move to a clearly inferior solution? Next you'll say they want to replace the super simple kickstart with preseed. Blasphemy I say!
- _ZeD_ 13y ago
  Clearly boh redhat and debian should switch to the even superior slackware txz.
- FooBarWidget 13y ago
  To be fair, it did take me 15 minutes to write my first RPM. Documentation is pretty good. Writing my first Debian package, on the other hand, took me a day. Documentation is horrible. All tutorials are outdated. All the documents throw tons of jargon at me and just expect that I understand them. The tooling consists of 300 different tools with a lot of overlapping functionality, mostly for historical and backward-compatibility reasons. Debuilder, pbuilder, dpkg-buildpackage, debhelper, cbbs.... what? Learning all this stuf was a nightmare, while RPM was pretty straightforward. Furthermore, Debian packaging tools don't have a preprocessor. It seems they really expect me to repackage my app separately for every distribution version. RPM on the other hand has a builtin preprocessor so that I can customize my specfile on a per-distribution basis with only a single file and a single tool. I ended up writing my own preprocessor for Debian packages, but something tells me I shouldn't have to. On the other hand, RPM does not support "Recommended" and "Suggested" dependencies which are very useful. Neither does it support OR statements in dependency specifications. This latter sucks, a lot.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    Fully agreed. I don't really like the RPM format, though, it's a glorified makefile which makes it inconvenient to generate in an automated fashion. Though, from what I can see, the Debian maintainers have done a good effort at bringing together the various packaging resources in a single document [1]. And, well, packaging is a complicated topic. 1: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/

When RedHat decides to switch to DEB

by raikage 13y ago

When RedHat decides to switch to DEB

And why would Reshat want to move to a clearly inferior solution? Next you'll say they want to replace the super simple kickstart with preseed. Blasphemy I say!

_ZeD_ 13y ago
Clearly boh redhat and debian should switch to the even superior slackware txz.
FooBarWidget 13y ago
To be fair, it did take me 15 minutes to write my first RPM. Documentation is pretty good. Writing my first Debian package, on the other hand, took me a day. Documentation is horrible. All tutorials are outdated. All the documents throw tons of jargon at me and just expect that I understand them. The tooling consists of 300 different tools with a lot of overlapping functionality, mostly for historical and backward-compatibility reasons. Debuilder, pbuilder, dpkg-buildpackage, debhelper, cbbs.... what? Learning all this stuf was a nightmare, while RPM was pretty straightforward. Furthermore, Debian packaging tools don't have a preprocessor. It seems they really expect me to repackage my app separately for every distribution version. RPM on the other hand has a builtin preprocessor so that I can customize my specfile on a per-distribution basis with only a single file and a single tool. I ended up writing my own preprocessor for Debian packages, but something tells me I shouldn't have to. On the other hand, RPM does not support "Recommended" and "Suggested" dependencies which are very useful. Neither does it support OR statements in dependency specifications. This latter sucks, a lot.
- mercurial 13y ago
  Fully agreed. I don't really like the RPM format, though, it's a glorified makefile which makes it inconvenient to generate in an automated fashion. Though, from what I can see, the Debian maintainers have done a good effort at bringing together the various packaging resources in a single document [1]. And, well, packaging is a complicated topic. 1: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/