Why are there two versions of Package Managements Debian Package Management and Redhat Package Management?

When would you use one Package Management instead of the other?

Is one overall better than the the other(DPM vs. RPM)? Does one have additional features that the other doesn't?

I just use whatever package manager is the default for the distro.

You use whichever package management your distribution provides. Neither is particularly superior and I haven't noticed any real differences in use apart from syntax though I have to admit I run Debian day-to-day and only use RPM based distributions in virtual machines to try them out. When I used to use RPM-based distributions dependency resolution was, how do I put it, "not quite there yet" and "dependency hell" was a common expression but I understand that that's largely a thing of the past and have seen it in Debian based distributions also.

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Historical reasons I'd guess. I think Debian was there first; not sure why Red Hat didn't want to use the Debian way of managing packages.

By the way there are more than two. For example Pacman in Arch Linux, or the way Gentoo does it, or Slackware's package management approach.

Personally, I would just use what my distro has built-in. Except if I created my own distro. What does LFS say?

You would probably have to deep-dive into them to find features that exist in one and are unavailable or can't be emulated by the other.

One difference is that Debian not only has the deb package format but also APT. Whereas RPM-based distros have the rpm package format but not necessarily the same repository management - RHEL/Centos etc use yum, SUSE uses Zypper. So you could argue that there is less standardisation in the RPM world.

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Thanks to everyone! I think with your help and some Google research, I am finding:


Both DPM and RPM are "package managers" which greatly simplify the process of installing, updating, otherwise maintaining, and removing

software. Deb files are installation files for debian based distributions. Deb files are used with dpkg, aptitude, apt-get that originated with the

Debian distro (of which Ubuntu is a variant).



RPM (RPM Package Manager) is a popular utility for installing software on Unix-like systems, particularly Red Hat Linux. Rpm files are used

with yum for the RedHat Package Manager, a similar but very different utility that originated with the Red Hat distribution. Rpm files are

installation files for Red Hat based distributions.


Prior to package managers, installing a new piece of software was a complicated process that turned off many. You had to locate its source

code, then compile and link that source into an executable binary file. The first attempt to do so usually resulted in a long string of error messages

about missing library files -- for which you had to search, install, and repeat the process. The package manager utilities made it possible to list

all these "dependencies" within a single file that also included a description, and the ready-to-run binary program file. The package manager takes

care of fetching all the needed dependencies, and also handles initial configuration of the new software. While the two different types of manager do

essentially the same job, their files are not directly interchangeable. A utility does exist for converting RPM files into the DEB format, but because

they differ significantly, in some respects, from those of Red Hat and its descendants there's no guarantee that a converted RPM file will

automatically configure things properly for the Debian standards of file location. It should be noted that not all distributions use package managers,

so if you want to learn more about the "old ways" you can try things like Slackware.

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Yep that's pretty much it