On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 09:53:29AM +0000, greg wrote: > > so far i've lived my life in the sheltered world of rpm and up2date. is > there a nice writeup anywhere anyone is aware of that does justice to > apt vs apt-get vs yum vs rpm vs up2date vs alien, rpm vs deb, and the > advantates and dangers in choosing amongst, even mixing and matching > amongst them? apt aned apt-get are the same thing, to my knowledge. deb and rpm are file formats while apt, yum and up2date are dependencies managers. Alien is a program that converts .rpm files to their .deb equivalent. Can't help you with apt, yum and up2date. Their was a comparison between them on lwn.net but it wasn't fair at all in regards to yum. Since you can install all of them on the same system, there's nothing stopping you from comparing them first-hand. As for the deb and rpm file formats, there's a comparison written by Joey Hess: http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ Emmanuel