On other thing about RPM distros and this IS a valid complaint about them. At first there was only Red Hat and RPMs. NO method of solving dependencies existed. One of the reasons APT-GET and deb was created was because RPMs could report what dependencies they needed but no system was in place to solve them.

Suse created Yast to solve that problem but they closed sourced it. Mandrake created URPMI but it's a hobby distro and it never caught on outside of drake fanatics.

Yum was created by yellow dog to solve RPMs and was adopted by Fedora so Yum finally made it into Red Hat.

Suse open sourced Yast finally. There are many solutions now but many are late comming to the field. Smart is another package manager that is cross system.

Some of this problem is that package managment was late to come to Red Hat and part of the problem is that most of the RPM distros were very conservative. Both Fedora and Suse are changing but that mindset is in place.

Its an interesting point about the repo size - I think its because there are a lot more RPM distros and they're a lot more seperate. Eg. Ubuntu can use the Debian universe of packages but Mandriva and Fedora are too different to have common package repositories.

That said with Mandriva the main (official) and contrib (semi-official - built on Mandriva build servers but not supported for security/bug updates) repos amount to over 11,000 packages. Add PLF to that and I've never had a depedency problem trying to get apps I need. These numbers are not far off Debian's repo at 15,000 packages and the same as Gentoos at 11,000.

I think you are wrong to say that rpm technology is behind others. Firstly comparing apt, portage and rpm is not correct. RPM is similar to DPKG in Debian which has exactly the same problems as RPM if you do not use a package manager. If you had compared yum, urpmi, yast and smart with apt or portage, then you would have been comparing like for like. Most of the package managers on RPM based distros work more or less the same as apt (some are better in my personal opinion) and if you don't like them, you can still use apt and synaptic.

I have noticed that most people who complain about RPM don't actually know how to use it. For example many people will try to install rpms not meant for their distro and moan when they experience problems. Not all rpm based distros come from the same code base or share package repositories, so rpms meant for one distro may not work on another distro. Most Debian distros use the same package repos, so packages rarely fail to install although this is changing with Ubuntu and variants taking their own path which is not always compatible with Debian.

Well, reddazz - in my views there are problems with the idea that you need a binary built for your distro. Needing a linux binary is a given but doesn't linux (for the most part, at least) promote working together and sharing? I understand that the problem with RPMs and their host distro's code base is unavoidable, but I tend to think that other things handle the problem better. Debian's .deb file extension works well across systems because they are based on the same code base, and Arch's .pkg works regardless (or so I believe - Frugalware and Arch share very little code as far as I have heard, but both have the same package manager and - If I am not mistaken - both can use the others .pkg files.)

I understand why someone would use an RPM / YaST / urpmi based distribution, but I believe that the concept of RPM's - not their technology - is becoming a bit dated.

(NOTE! I do NOT want to seem like I am attacking anyone - I'm sorry if any of these statements offend you. Please don't turn my statement around to turn this into a flamewar. Thank you)

Whats the exact problem with having a binary built for your distro? Whilst I agree with you that opensource culture encourages sharing and working together, in many instances, its not always possible because of various reasons e.g. Suse would not be able to share repos with Fedora Core or Mandriva because Suse puts some parts of KDE and GNOME in /opt whilst the other two use /usr.

As you mentioned above most Debian based distros share the same code base, so package compatibility will obviously be a lot better than RPM based distros. Most rpm based distros do not share the same history, code base and package repositories (e.g. Suse was at one time based on Slack, Mandriva forked completely from Redhat 5.x, Yoper was based on LFS and Slack), so their packages will not always be compatible with one another. This does not mean that dpkg is better than rpm because without apt, dpkg is just as problematic as rpm without yum, urpmi etc. The fact that Linux distros put stuff in different places, makes it difficult to build an rpm that will work on all rpm based distros. Similar problems are now happening in the Debian community because some derivatives like Ubuntu no longer maintain complete binary compatibility with the main Debian distro.

I am not sure what you mean here since the concept or rpms is similar to the concept of Debian, Arch, Slack and other distro package management systems i.e. to provide packages for their distro and make it easy way to install and manage them. I am sure if rpm was as bad as some people make it out to be, Redhat would have fixed it or chose a different package management system. As it is, rpm works well on Linux and other Unix like systems such as FreeBSD, AIX, HPUX, Solaris etc(although its not the main package management system).

Stating that RPMs are becoming dated wasn't entirely correct - I should have said that the individual nature of distros is what leads to my choice of debian / "independent" players (Arch and Slackware's package format) over RPM distros. Putting things in different folders leads to these problems (and while things have been done to correct this i.e the Freedesktop standards most RPM based distros do little to nothing to conform to them)

I didn't mean to say that RPMs are worse than anything else, but rather that the distros that are using them seem to do very little to help in the standardizing of all of the information that the RPMs actually need to install correctly.

I totally agree with you that there is a problem in terms of distros not following standards, particularly the FHS but remember that this is not just a problem with rpm based distros, but almost all Linux distros. I have actually never seen a Linux distro that follows all of the FHS. I guess its impossible for the distros to change now, because it takes a lot of time and effort to rewrite and implement new specs for an OS. The BSDs do a better job of following the FHS and its easy to find out where stuff is because they all follow similar conventions (which makes porting an app from one BSD to another very easy because most files go in the same places).

You have a great point here. Things like naming packages the same and using the same paths would make it a lot easier for people to install rpms for another distro on their own distro. This is never going to happen though because of the reasons I mentioned above and if it did happen I am not sure compatibility will improve much since package versions and dependency versions may differ.