At its 10th anniversary and after a period of uncertainty for the RPM community, together with a new roadmap towards version 5.0 the project environment of the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager was relaunched under the domain rpm5.org by the newly formed RPM project team, further on lead by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR, an integrated package dependency resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform support. Note: Please note that rpm5 is a fork of the 'real' rpm project.
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Member since:2006-09-24
I wish we could mod posts up past 5. Thank you for saving the rest of us some keystrokes by attempting to re-educate the Debian fanboys, yet again. You did forget one really big difference though. From a developer standpoint, rolling RPMs is trivial, DEBs however will drive some right to the brink of insanity.
Member since:2005-07-06
I think that the dependency resolving work is a good thing and - thank you for that it's not because RPM systems don't have dependency resolution already!
IMHO the good thing about RPM5 including a dependency resolver is that it means all RPM-based distros will be able to share effort on a common dependency resolving core. Right now, Fedora / CentOS / RHEL are using Yum, Novell use ... something ..., Mandriva use urpmi. Some people choose to use apt-rpm, some people use smart.
Focussing on a common core lets everyone benefit from the same dependency engine, which seems like a much more civilised way to go about things even if everyone builds different frontends on top of this.
Member since:2005-07-06
All you say is very true and I wish I could mod you up even further.
But a problem remains, from my point of view: too many dependency resolver are being used.
That becomes particularly bad when you find half a dozen package managers in the same distro: openSUSE!
I love SUSE, but I had been a fan of apt4rpm almost from the beginning. They abandoned it (and it had always been a pariah anyway). This has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Member since:
2005-11-11
I was just about to predict that the first few posts will be about RPM dependency hell and how Debian rules.
When will you people learn the difference between a package format and a dependency resolver? They're two different things, and are not mutually exclusive.
- .RPM is like Debian's .DEB. It's just a file format, and the standard package manager doesn't do any dependency resolving.
- Debian's APT is like RPM's yum, or RPM's APT (!). APT is a program, built on top of a packaging file format, and provides dependency resolving capabilities.
APT can be, and is, used in combination with RPM. See http://freshrpms.net/apt/
All modern RPM-based Linux distributions have a dependency resolver, similar to APT. For example, yum on Fedora, urpmi on Mandriva, etc. This has been the case for more than 3 years now.
RPM and DEB are technically very similar. Neither is really superior to the other. The only difference is that Debian repositories tend to be larger than RPM repositories, but that has got nothing to do with technical merits.
Edited 2007-05-30 10:42