On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 10:44:12PM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
> 
> Just as a curiosity:  Does anyone know the real differences between the
> Debian package format (not apt, just the .deb) and a rpm file?  I've
> heard that the Debian packages have better config file handling, but
> I've never used one enough to play with that.

RPM used to be a cpio based archive (RPM v1-3, I believe) -- now it's gone
to a nearly proprietary format entirely. The only way to access and create
these packages is with the rpm tools and libraries RH created.

DEBs, on the other hand, are really nothing more than ar archives with two
files in them: control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. The control tarball contains
the various shell scripts to be run for pre/post installation/removal, while
data.tar.gz contains the actual installation files.

If you read the documentation in the RPM sources, you'll see comments about
RH stating they wanted to make the package format fairly robust and easy to
use without the rpm tools, but alas, in the interest of robustness they seem
to have forgotten the *NIX philosophy of reusing standard tools instead of
creating proprietary ones.

-- 
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
mondoshawan@tank.dyndns.org
http://tank.dyndns.org