Difference between a Tar ball and rpm
 

hai,


Will you please tell me the difference between a Tar ball source and rpm. which one is better??? I want to know is there any particular reasons.

Thank you

tar bar normally is compress of source code for particular program, after extract it you need to build and install it manually (./configure, make, sudo make install). the tar ball can be small but the time to compile it maybe very long. For beginner I don't recommend you install software via tar ball. (It is painful some times.)

Hi ZAMO,

rpm is software package which has been compile and optimise by particular distro provider (redhat, suse, mandrake, fedora core and etc). Normally this kind of vendor will have a big repository which can solve all your software dependency issue. For beginner I would like to suggest you to use this method.

Except rpm, there is another alternative called deb (work similar with rpm).

If you are beginner, and you willing to learning more. I would recommend you to use ubuntu because it has huge repository of software(ubuntu use .deb).

Good luck,
Ks

A tar ball does not have to be source code--it can contain anything (including RPM packages!)

Suffixes like ".rpm", ".deb", etc. designate the files as packages to be handled by the package manager.

Suffixes like ".tar", ".gz", ".tgz", ".bz2", etc. all refer to archives and/or compression schemes. ANY file type can be compressed or put in an archive.

I will stick my neck out a bit and say that tar ball was coined to describe the Slackware bundling of packages, and uses tar and gzip to create the ball.

As the phrase was quite apt for many things, it is now used to describe something that is just tar'd or even with ball'd with bzip(2).

Maybe the original tar and feather slang would be more appropriate for generic tar and compression.

I don't think so...Unix utilities like tar were around before Linux was conceived--perhaps even before Linus Torvalds was born....

Well, assuming by "Tar ball" you mean a program compressed in tar ball format, there are quite a few differences. RPMs usually install via a double-click, unless they fail. Sometimes the install can be messy, and have duplicate libraries. But it's a lot easier.

Tar ball distribution of software is usually by source code. This means you have to compile from source code. This is often much easier than it sounds, sometimes it's not. This is a good place to read up on compiling programs from source.

A 'tar ball' emphasis on ball was used to refer to a tar file with compression added.

Before tarball was in common usage, 'tar and feathered' was the term.

It is debatable if Slackware was the first to coin the term, I do recall seeing the claim made by someone.

I think the term tarball preceded slackware. A slack tarball will have the extension .tgz. A compressed tar archive of source will normally use the extension .tar.gz. Sometimes bzip2 is used instead and has the extenstion .tar.bz.

In any case, the most important file in a source tarball will be the README file.

If your distro is RPM based, use that unless what you want is not available. Using your distro's packaging system will keep the rpm database up to date and allow security updates to occur in the future for that package. Also, the library versions will match up, and a Fedora Core or SuSE repository for example should have any requirements also available.

Here is just one of several Google hits with similar outcomes:
Found here:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/T/tarball.html
In the same Google search were found several references indicated that a .tar archive can be called a tarball---"with or without" compression.

Terms like this may have been popularized by Linux, but they existed before.