Neill:
Yes, the Red Hat Update requires registration, but they do not block
It's still a single source supplier and they want your data for something, I'm sure.
All software, by default, is single sourced, so what's that got to do with anything ?
"By default"? Well, debian has multiple sources of supply, including multiple distributions which you can move between.
The updates are freely available on all mirror sites, you don't /have/ to use up2date, I don't, they aren't getting marketing info out of me ;)
No, I know you have your own solutions.
Good luck. I hope you don't get burnt by the RPM problems that put me off for life (hey, when's RPMv5 coming out? ;-) )
you must be doing something wrong, I don't have any problems with RPM,
Good for you. Every time they bump a major version, they seem to forget the small matter of backwards compatibility.
and now with the apt-rpm proggie dependency resolution (which seems to be the biggest argument) the comparision between apt and rpm is very very minimal..
The comparison isn't so much between apt and rpm, as between dpkg and rpm. dpkg's deb files contain much better dependency information (ie package namess instead of files), so I would expect apt on top of rpm has to work rather harder to resolve dependencies. I also think that rpm doesn't have as many types of relationships between packages defined, but that may have been fixed in v4.