HN Explorer

Ask HN: RPMs or DEBs? Which is easier for devs to package their apps?

2 points by profwalkstr ↗ HN
In your experience packaging applications, is it easier to create RPMs or DEBs? What makes one easier or the other more complicated? What about the documentation and associated tools for creating the packages?

Is there one easier and simpler than the other or are both complicated beasts?

2 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] thread
kmarc
RPM has a cool feature, autoprov and autoreq: lookingat your to-be-packaged files, it will check the shared libraries in it and create the list of the requirements and provided capabilities. (note that with RPMs, packages can depend not only other packages but on provided libraries too

That said, unless you have a very specific reason to, do not attempt to package stuff yourself with spec files. Just use a tool like fpm to do the heavy lifting:

https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started.html

brudgers
To me, "which is better for users?" might be a better north star.

YMMV. Good luck.