2010/9/26 Kristoffer Grundström <kristoffer.grundstrom1983@gmail.com>

Why not create a new format with the best of both worlds (if possible)?

.mageia ?

[...]

Creating a new format is not that easy (though not impossible). Current .rpm or .deb are package formats which started development several years ago. Consider also that switching to another package format would require re-training for the packagers who might be be used to the .spec file only.

From technical point of view we have to distinguish the package format, which might be .deb, or .rpm from the package frontends (apt, urpmi, yum, emerge, etc.) which retrieves packages and their dependency packages from the repositories. Actually even on mandriva, some alternative frontend to urpmi can be used (IIRC there is "smart"). Speaking about frontends, I had the "feeling" that apt bundled with .deb was a little bit faster than urpmi+rpm, especially on global upgrades of a whole distro on not so new hardware (e.g. an i586...), i.e. upgrading for instance from a mandriva 2010.0 to a 2010.1 or from a ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. But maybe it's because .deb is doing fewer checks on files, dunno. Remaining on the .rpm world, the bundle urpmi+rpm seems to me also faster than yum+rpm.

IMHO it could be also taken under advisement the rpm5 format (http://www.rpm5.org), that someone already cited for mandriva some time ago. IIRC it should be faster than rpm4, and would allow parallel package installation.

If comparisons should be made for a decision, maybe on the wiki it could be added a table with the basic features of such tools (e.g. performance, LSB compliance, coerency, update, docs, compression, etc.), and the advantage of switching to a new one or a missed feature.

G.