No, Debian is much much stricter than RedHat or Fedora when it comes to licensing. I used RedHat back then, the real problem was that prior to yum/urpmi/whatever you had to manually hunt down each RPM only to discover it needs some more RPMs, and that’s what apt solved. That particular case WAS solved later on by the tools mentioned above, but it did give RPM a bad name (and that’s why people refer to RPM dependency hell to this very day, a lot of people switched to Debian/Ubuntu exactly because RPM based distros were behind the curve AT THAT time).

For the record, it was the other way round. maemo.org reacted sooner to predicted changes than they actually happened (and still didn’t happen because of reasons only known to Nokia).


next5 doesn’t like debian and it’s tools for some reason. I don’t have a problem with that, everybody should be free to choose whatever tool he likes (no point in forcing people to use emacs or vi, right ?). I do have a slight problem calling Debian tools and syntax idiotic, as I think then people using dpkg can also say RPM distros and tools have an idiotic syntax. The word that is being sought here is ’different’, as have been already proven in this thread.


Face it, on a higher level nobody cares if it’s DEB or RPM. Really. Even genuine MeeGo folks, they don’t really give a toss, none of the reasons given by RPM enthusiasts here were the main motivators to the final outcome.