Author: Vic Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Dependency hell (Was: Re: Xorg is hungry today...)
> I was wondering if
> someone could explain why .deb packages don't have "dependency hell" but
> rpm's do.
rpms don't.
There is essentially no difference between the control afforded by rpms
and debs. Sadly, some people insist on the erroneous and disingenuous (to
the point of being malicious) comparison of rpm against apt; these are
different programs with different purposes, and therefore not comparable.
The proper comparison would be either apt against apt (which,
unsurprisingly compares very well indeed) or apt against yum (which
compares favourably, according to preference).
> Especially as I've not had rpm dependency problems since yum
> came along to sort them out.
I've not had an rpm dependency issue since I accidentally deleteed the
whole of my /var partition - and you can hardly blame rpm for that. I have
had a dependency problem with a .deb-based distribution - but I think that
is actually a bug in apt, rather than some inherent failing in the Debian
packaging system.
> possibly
> better tools for creating a .deb package
I'm really not convinced that's true; I think the tools for creating rpms
are better than those for creating debs. But much of that will come down
to preference.
