I haven't used rpm for a while having left redhat for ubuntu years back so this may be out of date: but certainly at the the time rpm was famous for "dependency hell" and deservedly so - almost everything I tried to install was a circular nightmare of incompatible dependencies. To the extent that i'd have to give up or resort to compiling from source. OTOH, apt was an absolute dream. It just worked. It'd fish anything required out of remote depository. There were never any version incompatabilities. I've never once had a failed install. On moving to apt I never looked back and would never use rpm again: indeed for me apt was Ubuntu's "killer feature".
> I haven't used rpm for a while having left redhat for ubuntu years back so this may be out of date: but certainly at the the time rpm was famous for "dependency hell" and deservedly so ...
True, but since then yum has taken over from rpm, and yum automatically resolves dependency issues. Just saying.
All major distributions have tools that avoid dependency hell, in one way or another. The bad old days of rpm trying to sort things out on its own -- and failing -- are gone, and good riddance.
> On moving to apt I never looked back and would never use rpm again.
Yes, but it's important to point out that Red Hat / Fedora users don't use rpm any more either.
apt is not the equivalent of rpm. dpkg is the equivalent of rpm. And dpkg is equally dumb (both of them "by design" - it's not what they're meant to do)
But Yum and Apt as well as other tools have been available to do automatic dependency resolution on RPM based distros for many years - I believe at least apt-rpm predates Ubuntu.
