RPM vs DEB vs Slackware-like tgz

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Gerard Beekmans wrote:
>> Yes. Note that I have not evaluated pacman.
> 
> Do you by chance have any plans or desire to do so in the near future?

Not in the nearest future--too busy with bureaucracy that surrounds presenting 
the dissertation (scheduled for July, 3).

>> What's even more important for educational purposes, Debian rules are incoherent 
>> between various Debian packages.
> 
> How does RPM differ in that regard? Couldn't RPM spec files (in theory?) 
> suffer from the same problem depending on who writes them?

RPM doesn't have this amount of additional layers of almost-mandatory helpers 
for getting dependencies right, and the "debconf" tool for interactive package 
configuration. As I said, a few Debian packagers do things by hand, some use 
debhelper, some call cdbs (that doesn't even contain the explicit build 
instructions, but is suitable only for simple CMMI-like packages), and there are 
other options.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov