What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

libsandwich · 2010-12-29 00:45:18

Recently I bought the Humble Indie Bundle # 2, which is a pack of indie games, all of which have support for Mac, Linux, and Windows. For the Linux user, I was kind of struck by the huge number of file types available. For some games there were 4 or 5 available formats. I had a short chat with one of the people behind the project, who said they'd had tons of requests for multiple formats, like .deb files.

So why did Debian and Redhat feel the need to create their own archive format? What's the advantage? .bin and tarballs work universally, why obfuscate the situation?

BaconPie · 2010-12-29 01:03:30

Mostly guessing here:

Do .deb and .rpm contain package manager information so that the files are installed using their respective package managers. Sure, a .tar works fine on Arch but it doesn't go via pacman. If you want it to do that then you need a PKGBUILD.

Last edited by BaconPie (2010-12-29 01:03:59)

falconindy · 2010-12-29 01:21:42

Just because the extension changes doesn't make the file that much different.

- An RPM file is a gzipped tarball with a few extra pieces of data in the header. bsdtar(1) will actually ignore the bogus data and rip it right apart.
- A deb file is a GNU archive. A little more obscure, but can be just as easily torn apart with ar(1).

Arch could just as easily do this and give all pacman packages their own extension such as .pac. Doesn't make it any less or more of an XZ compressed tarball.

The underlying difference is that yes, there's some metadata included in the archive that a package manager is expecting to find.

Last edited by falconindy (2010-12-29 01:22:05)

drcouzelis · 2010-12-29 01:25:23

libsandwich wrote:

So why did Debian and Redhat feel the need to create their own archive format? What's the advantage?

You mean, why did anyone decide to make their own package format, including for Arch Linux?

I think it's due to the nature of software on Linux. I think there's a lot more shared unique libraries compared to other operating systems. If an application is going to run, it needs to know that the needed libraries are installed. It would be a pain to create this functionality individually for every piece of software. A package format can take care of it instead.

...I'm sorry, I thought I'd have a more interesting answer than that. I don't.

Anyway, creators of different package formats think they can make a better one than others. In the case of the creator of the Arch Linux package format, I agree.

thisoldman · 2010-12-29 02:13:42

Deb is older, rpm is part of the Linux Standard Base, ISO/IEC 23360. Package management was a big step forward, allowing a system administrator to install the same software multiple times with a one line command (Did I hear, "Script?"). Unfortunately, the many different package managers can cause distro compatibility problems for end users. For an example, look at Amazon's mp3 downloader software page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/am … v_dmusic_6.

I suspect the adoption of rpm for the LSB at the time was because both Suse and Red Hat were pushing for it. Red Hat and Suse were making money from Linux, there was no commercial backing for Debian.

It's easy to see why both Suse and Red Hat were pushing for rpm to be adopted. They both wanted to become not "Linux Standard Base Compliant" but to become "The Linux Standard."

See this short 2005 Arch Linux Forum thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=14152 and this portion of the Wikipedia article, Linux Standard Base, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Stan … #Criticism.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-12-29 00:45:18

What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

#2 2010-12-29 01:03:30

Re: What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

#3 2010-12-29 01:21:42

Re: What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

#4 2010-12-29 01:25:23

Re: What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

#5 2010-12-29 02:13:42

Re: What is the point of .deb and .rpm archive formats?

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