[Mageia-discuss] rpm or deb?

[Giuseppe Ghibò]

2010/9/26 Kristoffer Grundström <kristoffer.grundstrom1983 at gmail.com>

>  Why not create a new format with the best of both worlds (if possible)?
>
> .mageia ?
>
> [...]
>

Creating a new format is not that easy (though not impossible). Current .rpm
or .deb are package formats which started development several years ago.
Consider also that switching to another package format would require
re-training for the packagers who might be be used to the .spec file only.

>From technical point of view we have to distinguish the package format,
which might be .deb, or .rpm from the package frontends (apt, urpmi, yum,
emerge, etc.) which retrieves packages and their dependency packages from
the repositories. Actually even on mandriva, some alternative frontend to
urpmi can be used (IIRC there is "smart"). Speaking about frontends, I had
the "feeling" that apt bundled with .deb was a little bit faster than
urpmi+rpm, especially on global upgrades of a whole distro on not so new
hardware (e.g. an i586...), i.e. upgrading for instance from a mandriva
2010.0 to a 2010.1 or from a ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. But maybe it's because
.deb is doing fewer checks on files, dunno. Remaining on the .rpm world, the
bundle urpmi+rpm seems to me also faster than yum+rpm.

IMHO it could be also taken under advisement the rpm5 format (
http://www.rpm5.org), that someone already cited for mandriva some time ago.
IIRC it should be faster than rpm4, and would allow parallel package
installation.

If comparisons should be made for a decision, maybe on the wiki it could be
added a table with the basic features of such tools (e.g. performance, LSB
compliance, coerency, update, docs, compression, etc.), and the advantage of
switching to a new one or a missed feature.

G.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/mageia-discuss/attachments/20100927/082431ac/attachment.html>