Daniel Kreuter wrote:

I don't agree with you at that point. I always take the tarball from eclipse.org (for eclipse) or netbeans.org (for netbeans) instead of the one's of repository provided by the distro.
The reason is quite simple, the one's mentioned above are newer than the one's in the repos (often, not always but everywhere i looked for it, it was so)

But there may be people who will first look in rpmdrake or urpmi that's right, but not everybody.

Well, I didn't say *everybody*, I was referring to newer users who might actually do what we tell them to :-)

The problem is that there is a very high probability that anyone who installs from an RPM will then install plugins directly.  Given that, I would question even packaging the base product as an RPM.

Then again, there's the concern about whether an RPM-provided package may provide something a tarball does not, or vice-versa.  For example, the MDV Java RPMs play all sorts of games with /etc/alternatives and don't (I think) set environment variables like JAVA_HOME.  This means that tarball installs of things like Ant need manual tweaking to work correctly with an RPM-based JDK.  The RPM-based Ant has wrapper scripts which depend on the /etc/alternatives stuff and determine JAVA_HOME on the fly.