Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB              TGZ              Conclusion              Notes              References
Comparison of binary package formats
Miloš Jakubíček
7   i

PV208 Advanced topics of Linux administration Faculty of informatics, Masaryk University
February 28, 2008
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Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB                                    Conclusion              Notes              References
Q Purpose Q Formats O RPM O DEB O TGZ O Conclusion O Notes Q References
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB                                    Conclusion              Notes              References
Pu rpose of binary packages
Provide a prebuilt software and related metainformation which can be used to enable the users/administrators to easily maintain (install, upgrade, remove) the system and application programs (central repositories, dependency hell, autoupdates, ...) so that the system remains consistent and its resources are used in a efficient way.
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM                                                          Conclusion              Notes              References
•  RPM (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, SUSE, Mandriva, ...)
•  DEB (Debian, Ubuntu, ...)
•  TGZ (FreeBSD, Arch Linux, Slackware, ...)
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM                                                          Conclusion              Notes              References
•   RPM, SRPM, SPEC files, internal uses gzip for compression.
a SPEC file structure: name, summary, description, E-V-R, (build)requires, '/.prep,  '/.build,  '/.install,  '/.clean, scriptlets, triggers.
•  pros: DeltaRPM (Mandriva, SUSE, F9), GPG signatures, good support for multilib systems, SPEC file variability, autogenerating dependencies, most widespread.
•  cons: no suggestions, rich features mean less simple design, need to use rpm2cpio to unpack.
•  rpmlint
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB              TGZ              Conclusion              Notes              References
DEB binary packages			
• debian-binary, data.tar.gz, control.tar.gz			
• pros: suggestions (vs.	interactivity!)	, tar	archive, package
priorities, GPG signed packages			
• cons: no direct multilib support, no		file dependencies, no	
triggers.			
• control file structure:	similar to the	RPM	s (except from
namings:)			
• lintian			
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB              TGZ              Conclusion              Notes              References
•  the way of using the archives varies across the distributions pretty much.
•  Arch Linux: PKGBUILD + .FILELIST, .PKGINFO, .INSTALL
•  pros: the use of standard format
•  cons: no GPG signing, no triggers, the use is limited to one or a few distributions not very widespread nowadays
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB              TGZ              Conclusion              Notes              References
•  We may consider that (almost) every distro has its own package policy which can differ from the standard use.
•  If we need rich features the competition is limited to RPM or DEB and is almost always determined by the choice of your distribution. Hence it is rather a subject to flame:) Although it would be probably possible to use a different package format,
I doubt there are many users going this way.
Table of contents              Purpose              Formats              RPM              DEB                                    Conclusion              Notes              References
Related information
•  Package managements systems: up2date, yum, urpmi, apt.
•  package formats conversion: alien (still not stable).
Table of contents           Purpose           Formats           RPM            DEB           TGZ           Conclusion            Notes
References
Links
DEB:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_ffile_format)
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8047723203.html
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkg_basics.en.html
RPM:
http://www.rpm.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/
http://genetikayos.com/code/repos/rpm-tutorial/trunk/rpm-tutorial.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-rpml/
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/navody/rukovet-balice-rpm-i-uvod
TGZ: http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/system/balickovaci-system-arch-linuxu-l-format-balicku
Others:
plkárna Fl: thread Distro showdown - let your voices be heard (21.9.2007)
http://kitenet.net/ joey/pkg-comp/
http: //I in ux.die.net/man/1/a lien
http://www.howtoforge.com/converting_rpm_to_deb_with_alien
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