Technorama

An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.

Friday, 2 January 2009

Redhat ditch RPM for DEB apt-get in 2009?

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Labels: Consolidation, Future, GNU+Linux, Ubuntu

posted by 東京 # 14:56

Comments:

I have seen several people "in the know" claim that RPM tools are more advanced that DPKG tools for newer versions of RPM. I would normally discount this as fanboyism, but the two developers worked on Ubuntu.

# posted by

Unknown : 3 January 2009 at 04:35

Daengbo: Thanks for your comment.

I'd like to see the developers of RPM and DEB work together to find a common way forward, if DEB is behind, definitely it should incorporate features Redhat would need.

There are many duplications in GNU-Linux distros, DEB vs RPM is just one. If GNU-Linux is ever going to dominate on the desktop it needs to standardise and give users a similar experience on different distros they try out!

# posted by

東京 : 3 January 2009 at 11:58

Don't blame RPM for dependency problems, blame the developers of the .rpm files.

.deb files also suffer dependency problems, but I don't see you complaining about it. How come?

# posted by

Anonymous : 3 January 2009 at 23:39

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