What are the differences between .rpm and .deb?
 

I'm not trying to start a war or something, but I really what to know what are the drawbacks and benefits of each, if any. Just in general if my question is too vague.

RPM - Advantages Advantages and disadvantages of the format

deb - Debian Reference

RPMs seem to have more problems with "Dependency hell" .


Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Any package format including source can suffer from dependency hell. If you use package management tools such as apt, yum, urpmi this problem is drastically reduced. Debian was the first distribution to create a good package management tool for their *.deb format and it was then ported to rpm based distros. Unfortunately you will still get some people in the Debian camp slagging off rpm based distros for RPMS design and dependency hell, but these days its not really an issue since the package management tools used on Debian are also available on rpm based distros. The only weakness I have noticed with rpm based distros is that if you try and upgrade an entire distribution using automated tools, some things may break, but I know that some distributions such as CentOS use yum to upgrade systems from one point release to another.