Re: New package managment

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com> writes:

> The problem I had most often with RPM packages is bad packages, that
> don't even work correctly on a stock system. That's not even counting
> bugs in some packages (as the qt and qt-devel packages of RH6, the
> libqt.so link is in the wrong package, leading to conflicts when
> installing a newer qt library).
> 
> These problems are likely to happen also with Debian packages and no
> package system can probably hope to "fix" them.

The main advantage of Debian is that Debian has the infrastructure to
handle the packages. For a RPM everybody can build a RPM and  upload it on
a webpage, but it may or may not work, some RPMs work only on SuSE,
some only on Redhat, etc. The problem is that there is no policy that
the package builder should follow, no bugtracking system, there is
almost nothing, each package builder does is job alone.

But for Debian there is a policy, there is bugtracking system, there
is a developers mailing list and at least Debian is a free
distribution, so its need to have those things to make it work. You
could still build a deb package on your own and get the same throuble
as with rpm. But the chances are good, that most free projects out
there find a debian maintainer for there package and so the chances
are very very good that the package is going out of the box.

-- 
                                  http://dark.x.dtu.dk/~grumbel/pingus/ | 
Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>             http://home.pages.de/~grumbel/ |
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