history of .deb and .rpm?

[Joey Hess]

Steve M Bibayoff wrote:
> Does anyone no where I could find a history of the development of the
> deb's? Especially in relations to rpm's. I mostly need to know why the
> DPMS was developed when RPM's where already used(?) ?

They weren't. The debian package format had its start before redhat was
released, and may have predated the rpm package format entirely.

Anyway, a short history:

1993: Work on Debian begins.
1994: First public prerelease, which had a primitive package manager,
      which was written in perl. At this point, Debian packages were a
      type of cpio archive with I assume some custom header (note parallell
      with current rpm format).
1994: Redhat is founded.
1995: dpkg appears in its current form as a C program. For a while
      debian packages were tarballs with a binary header prepended. 
      Then debian packages are switched over to using the ar format they use
      to this day.
1995: Redhat's "mother's day" release, which I think was the first
      public release of redhat. (There may have been one earlier
      release, I forget).
1996: Debian 1.1, first official release of Debian.

Sources: 
* The debian-history package.
* Conversations with debian oldtimers.
* COLA archives
* http://www.redhat.com/about/

-- 
see shy jo