Debian

[Liam Proven]

On 17/09/2007, Mihamina (R12y) Rakotomandimby
<mihamina.rakotomandimby at etu.univ-orleans.fr> wrote:
> musicman wrote:
>
> > eg: debian uses the apt package management system, redhat uses rpm,
> > SUSE uses YaST, gentoo uses emerge (I think that's all correct). Note
> > that 5 years ago this was an issue, but these days most distros come
> > with a "install with other system's package manager".
>
> Please, dont make people more confused:
> the equivalences are:
>
> rpm - dpkg
> apt - yum(fedora)/urpmi(mandriva)/yast(suse)
>
> And yes, debian is a pain on its release cycle :)

I disagree. There is no benefit at all in distinguishing between the
end-user tools used to manipulate packages, because there are dozens.
Both apt and dpkg are package tools, as are aptitude, synaptic,
kpackage and many others.

The underlying format is what matters, as the original post you sought
to "correct" stated.

 - Debian derivatives use .DEB (managed underneath by dpkg and apt and
so on, but that is irrelevant; you can get APT for RPM now, for
instance)
 - RPM is used on all Red Hat derivatives (e.g. Mandriva) and others (e.g. SUSE)
 - Slackware uses tarballs
 - Gentoo uses raw source in a Ports tree, like the xBSDs do
... and there are others.

The best thing to use to ditinguish and compare is the lowest common
denominator, the package format itself, not the tools used to
manipulate those packages, because those vary widely and have multiple
alternatives simultaneously available.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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