rsync progress

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, in summary, if it uses DEB it's based on Debian.
>
> RPM was inferior but not so tied to the distro, repositories, etc. and
> so caught on and was adopted by other distros leading to 3 main
> families.
>

While I understand your point, I think it's important to note that rpm
never was inferior to Debian's system (in fact, it's arguably superior).
But that's because comparing rpm and apt is where the breakdown is.  The
rpm utility was never analogous to apt but to dpkg. Both rpm and dpkg are
low level utilities that operate on individual packages and do not do
dependency checking beyond "is the dependency already installed or is it
indicated on my command line?"

The correct utility to compare apt to is yum and/or zypper.  The reputation
of rpm suffers due to the relatively late widespread adoption of yum (and
SUSE's zypper).  Debian and Debian-derived systems would have suffered the
same issues as rpm based systems back in the day if the administrators were
restricted to using only dpkg for package management.

In short, the comparison between rpm and apt unfairly characterizes rpm as
being "a dumb utility" when its direct analog, dpkg, is also "a dumb
utility".  The dependency handling (retrieval and concurrent installation)
for both rpm and dpkg are handled by higher level software.  It's been a
boon to Debian's reputation to have that higher level software already
provided with the introduction of the deb package system.  However, the
only thing rpm based systems can be criticized for in this regard is not
having an apt-like utility from the beginning.  They all have it now.

-- 
Chris

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the
Universe." -- Carl Sagan
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