There are a number of errors and omissions here that I would like to try to clarify. These complaints seem to stem from a lack of understanding with dpkg and its workings, and some are rather... out of date. Just about the only thing I agree with is that I wish package checksums would be required by Policy!

> RPM starts off with the concept of pristine sources. It is vehemently rejected that a maintainer of a rpm package use a non-upstream tarball or change _anything_ without a patch that is in version control.

dpkg is exactly the same. A "source package" consists of a .dsc file, which is metadata, an .orig.tar.gz file, which is the pristine upstream source, and a .debian.tar.gz, which is extracted to a 'debian/' directory after the pristine archive is unpacked. Within the debian directory is the build system, including local patches, which live under debian/patches.

> Changes are atomic. They use the bdb transactions and rollback. Either something was installed (via CPIO) or it was not. Debian package manager uses flat text-files! Those flat text files live under /var/lib/dpkg [Figure 1 below]. There are about 3-4 of these files per package, and they often times corrupt, resulting in impossible to uninstall packages. This simply doesn’t exist with rpms.

I have seen the RPM database become corrupted several times over the years, including if I tried to install an RPM while low on disk space! I have never seen the same with the dpkg database. And dpkg is no less "atomic"; dpkg keeps track of a package's state, and if interrupted a new instance will clean up or resume whatever the old instance was doing.

> •	The Debian package format lacked multiarch support until Jan 31, 2012[2]. Up until this version, installing a 32 bit deb on a 64 bit operating system involved creating a full system 32 bit chroot (I shit you not!), with hundreds of megabytes of silliness. Rpm has had multiarch basically since the majority of Fedora compiled with 64 bit compilers (around early 2005).

This is not a valid comparison. Multiarch in RPM means something completely different to what it means in dpkg. dpkg's multiarch system is much more powerful and complete.

> With dpkg, it is possible to get into states which are impossible to resolve with the cli utilities (even dpkg –-configure –a). This always results in having to manually edit the pre/post hacky script under /var/lib/dpkg and is serious voodoo black magic that only experts should ever do. The problem is that it isn’t uncommon. If the pre/post scripts do ever fail bad enough to where you can’t fully remove a package, you can do rpm –e –-noscripts.

This is 6 of one, half-a-dozen of the other. In the RPM world you end up without the cleanup from the script ever taking place, and so the package ends up leaving traces of whatever throughout your system.

I've never thought of editing the maintainer scripts under /var/lib/dpkg/info as "serious voodoo". They are simple shell scripts, written to dispatch off of argv in the machinism specified by Policy. Errors in good quality packages are rare and trivial to fix.

> Debian packages have this “rc” state where they are partially installed / uninstalled, but not fully either. Then you have to purge them using dpkg –-purge, and that is assuming that you’ve successfully hacked up the scripts that read the plain text files under /var/lib/dpkg.

This is a good feature of dpkg. It allows packages to be removed without their conffiles or other important data (e.g., your PostgreSQL databases) being removed along with them, unless the admin takes the manual action to purge the package.

> The entire design is unbelievably fragile. They make it a bit less fragile by writing an ENORMOUS debian packaging policy[5] to try to get people to work around silly limitations in the software via policy. This is against one of the fundamental design choices of rpm, which is that package installs should be atomic. It is either installed, or not installed. There is no “I’m half installed” status for rpm packages.

So then, what state is a package in if RPM is interrupted while unpacking files? dpkg puts the package into 'half-installed' state, from where you can run a new instance to continue the installation or remove the package.

As for CDBS or debhelper, the vast majority of packages in the archive use debhelper, and debhelper use is increasing over time. Developer documentation tells you to use debhelper. The rest of the complaints about the build process I really don't understand, but perhaps I have just been building packages for too long. I'll take 'dpkg -i foo.deb' over 'rpm -ivh', oh wait, I meant '-Uvh' any day. :p