Nineteen distribution channels later: what it actually costs to give a terminal editor away for free on Linux, and why the next step is a static musl binary that updates itself.
I looked at .deb as well and boy are there weird things there.
There are many similarities between RPM and pkgbuild for Arch, so I could easily copy almost entire pkgbuilds from AUR and merely adapt a few variables but whatever the inventors of .deb concocted is crazy.
That build method dates back super-far, and probably mirrors unix packaging of the day. This is not a good thing, in that it did miss out on some validation features that RPM and NIX have, and that’s a problem that hasn’t been fixed (in unix or debian) even now (25+ years after we noticed it in the enterprise OS company I worked at, and which invalidated debian even then as a product we wanted to support alongside unix).
That build method dates back super-far, and probably mirrors unix packaging of the day. This is not a good thing, in that it did miss out on some validation features that RPM and NIX have, and that’s a problem that hasn’t been fixed (in unix or debian) even now (25+ years after we noticed it in the enterprise OS company I worked at, and which invalidated debian even then as a product we wanted to support alongside unix).