[ Thanks to Ladislav Bodnar for this
link. ]
One of the greatest strengths–and also one of the greatest
weaknesses–of GNU/Linux is the way that numerous developers have
taken the OS and molded it the way they like it. Occasionally this
produces a ‘fork’–two (or more) camps of devout users, both
vehemently insisting that their way of doing things is best. The
most prominent example of this is probably the great GUI debate (Is
KDE or Gnome better?). Another equally important divide exists over
the seemingly mundane issue of package management. The two biggest
contenders are the Red Hat package manager (RPM, as it is popularly
known) and Debian’s Advanced Package Tool (APT, or apt-get)
system.“Until late 2002, it seemed as if the debate was all but
over–RPM was winning by a landslide. All the major Linux
distros–including but not limited to Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE,
Caldera, and Conectiva–were RPM based. Furthermore, the LSB (Linux
Standard Base) project endorsed RPM. To add insult to injury, the
big-three Debian-based commercial distros failed in the
marketplace–Stormix, Corel and Progeny.“Debian users had their loyalty tested when Linux kernel 2.4 was
released in January, 2000. Within four months of the release, all
the major RPM-based distros produced sets of nicely packaged CDs
based on the new kernel. But for Debian users, the process of
migrating to the new kernel took more than two years. During this
interval, Debian was falling seriously behind the other well-known
distros in terms of features…”