On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:19:44 +0530, Dhawal Doshy said:
Am not sure if this is included but also add that 'rpms' are non-interactive.. no interaction at all.. period. .debs on the other hand IIRC, can do some post/pre thing.
Not having used rpm's recently, I was not sure if there is a debconf equivalent. debconf can have a GUI, curses, or readline front-end, and the interaction is internationalized, so the questions can be asked in the native tongue of the person doing the install, if the translation is up to date.
Though i come from a rpm background and the current state of affairs is not too encouraging, addition of apt/yum has done wonders to rpm and takes care of the dependency hell (yes it did exist). Also redhat, novell and others have recently come together again to maintain RPM and take it forward from the current state.
A nice read anyways.. just to support RPM, yum adds recommendations and suggestions to RPM. Also 'binary programs allowed' sounds confusing as RPM does support packaging of binary files. Another plus of an RPM is the '-V' option to verify the integrity of an installed RPM (i am not sure if that exists in deb)
Well, this is meant to be talking about the stuff run pre/post installing a package. for rpm, it has to be in the spec file -- which means that it must be a script. For debian, since they are in external files, you could sneak in a compiled binary (which would be against policy, but hey, you could do it)
manoj