RPM vs DEB vs Slackware-like tgz

[J. Greenlees]

Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
2 additional benefits to rpm:
http://rpmlint.zarb.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi
rpm lint, to help keep filesystem clean of no-longer used files.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Spec-Helper
spec-helper, a set of scripts that assists in making the rpms to a
consistent format.

While many people don't like Mandriva, they have developed a set of
tools that work very well, and made them open source. little things like
the spec-helper script are valuable for making a "distro" with
consistent package manager spec files.
[ Mandriva falls short on the package description end. ]