difference between .rpm and .deb?

[cruzerMicro]

hay whats the difference between .rpm, .deb and targz? i there any different usage among these 3. and advantages and disadvantages?

[bigtomrodney]

RPM and Deb are both package management formats. They function in a very similar way and the choice between the two is made by your distribution generally. The packages let the system know what they contain, where it should be put, what is required by the application and sometimes a configuration script.

Tarballs like tar.gz are often source files from which you can build the application. Sometimes they are a precompiled binaries that you can run or install manually. Whie it is good o know how to work with source or static binaries it's not the best way to keep a clean running system in today's modern distro. A tar.gz or tar.bz2 is similar to a zip file.

Slackware however does include it's packages in a gzipped format that is a more basic package manager.

On the package front it's worth noticing that they are often combined with systems to extend their usefulness. Rpm is often combined with urpmi (Mandriva), yum (Red Hat, Fedora, Yellow Dog), yast (SUSE), apt-get (Debian) or similar. These allow management of repositories and automatic downloading of applications and dependencies.

[cruzerMicro]

RPM and Deb are both package management formats. They function in a very similar way and the choice between the two is made by your distribution generally. The packages let the system know what they contain, where it should be put, what is required by the application and sometimes a configuration script.

Tarballs like tar.gz are often source files from which you can build the application. Sometimes they are a precompiled binaries that you can run or install manually. Whie it is good o know how to work with source or static binaries it's not the best way to keep a clean running system in today's modern distro. A tar.gz or tar.bz2 is similar to a zip file.

Slackware however does include it's packages in a gzipped format that is a more basic package manager.

On the package front it's worth noticing that they are often combined with systems to extend their usefulness. Rpm is often combined with urpmi (Mandriva), yum (Red Hat, Fedora, Yellow Dog), yast (SUSE), apt-get (Debian) or similar. These allow management of repositories and automatic downloading of applications and dependencies.

thanks!!


hay can i say that the .rpm is like .exe in windows. i understand that the .rpm is just waiting for us to execute it like: ./someRPMfile.rpm

so the .deb and the .rpm is same but for different distribution than?


what do you mean by:

it's not the best way to keep a clean running system in today's modern
distro

for the tar.gz

[bigtomrodney]

Sometimes rpms are associated with programs within your desktop environment but they are not executable. If you wanted to install one on the command line you would use the rpm command

rpm -i something.rpm

As I said this is in the most basic form. I would recommend against that however - use the management system for your distro so that all of the dependency checking etc is looked after. In Debian you could install Firefox with

apt-get install firefox

This would download firefox and anything needed to run it and install it directly for you. Don't bother individually installing rpms or debs.

Rpms and debs are stored in a database system that tracks all changes to your system . Tarballs on the other hand are not, so if you install something this way whether it's source or binary it will not be tracked and it will be up to you to remove all installed files by hand.

[Roxoff]

May I just add that there is a little bit of a difference between .rpm/.deb packages and windows installer .exe's and .msi files.

A package on Linux isn't necessarily a computer program/tool/application, as btr has already said, it's a set of components. Applications often rely on other packages of components being installed, you might do the 'apt-get install firefox' (or 'yum install firefox' if your system uses rpm rather than deb) suggested by btr above as an example, and it'll install not just the firefox package, but a whole set of extra packages which it needs to support it. There may be additional extra bits that you can get for the application too, this is particularly common with media players which frequently have optional codec packages.

You don't get this with Windows .exe's which tend to have everything included that you need, hence producing bigger distributable installer files, and wasting bandwidth, or (even worse) not providing all the dependent packages and pointing you back to Microsoft or other suppliers (such as Adobe for flash or pdf, or to Sun for Java, for example) which you then have to match, download and install yourself.

[bigtomrodney]

Roxoff, you bring up an interesting point - .msi files are actually packages for Windows. Although it does not appear that way to the end user it is actually quite similar to debs and rpms. In fact we have a department where I work that specifically packages applications with the required configuration for various departments and distributes them from a repository. A scheduled update on the client machines installs these apps in the background.

Sounds familiar doesn't it That is why .msi files usually have a minute setup.exe file, either simply for familiarity or to call the windows installer service to manage the .msi.