Deb or RPM - Is there a Difference?

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

I've learned that they are incompatible, but both seem about the same (using Synaptic, anyway). Is one better than the other? Will Synaptic always support both?

Sorry for such a n00b question but they both look the same to me, but it also looks like deb is alot more common.

Just wondering,
Amy

[reed9]

From the end user point of view, there isn't a lot of difference. On technical merits, well, I haven't a clue what the advantages and disadvantages are. Basically, they're just archive formats for the program files.

My experience has been, package management for most rpm based sytems is significantly slower than in debian based systems. That seems to be changing, though. Fedora is using the package deltas, so you only have to download the bits of the package that change, to reduce the amount of download, and I think yum has seen some speed increases. I don't know about zypper on OpenSuse. Urpmi in Mandriva still seemed slow to me when I tried out the 2009 release.

PCLinuxOS is the only rpm distro that is using the apt-rpm port, that I'm aware of. (I think that's what they use still, right?)

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

In the PCLXDE that we're playing with we can use "apt-get" and Synaptic just as we did in Ubuntu with no noticeable difference in speed. But I thought I read somewhere (and Google can't find it for me again) that Synaptic may not support rpm in the future. Not that it's a deal-breaker, but I really Synaptic's simplicity.

Amy

[reed9]

Synaptic is a front-end for the Advanced Package Management tool, APT, which was originally developed by Debian. APT itself is a frontend to dpkg, which was the originally package management tool, and basically equivalent to rpm, originally the Red Hat Package Manager, but now standing for the recursive (why do geeks love recursive acronyms so much??) RPM Package Manager. RPM can refer to either the package manager or the package format, which is sometimes a little confusing.

Some years ago, a company named Conectiva and their eponymously named linux distro, ported APT to work with rpm packages. Conectiva was eventually purchased by Mandrakesoft, who later changed their name to Mandriva. PCLinuxOS based themselves on Mandriva, and PCLXDE is further derived from PCLinuxOS, and now you have a history and family tree that bears little relation to your question, so don't ask me why I decided to write it.

Anyway, apt-rpm appears to be an unmaintained project, so it seems likely that Synaptic and APT for rpm may be removed from the PCLinuxOS family. I believe the main developer of apt-rpm moved on to working on the Smart Package Manager.

Regarding speed, Synaptic is Synaptic in any distro, so I wouldn't expect a significant performance difference.