A story of packages: SFS, Debian, and FreeBSD This gets to a piece of Debian-ese that seems a bit counter-intuitive at first: you can’t compile and install a Debian package in one step. Rather, you download the source package, compile it, build a Debian .deb package binary. Once you’ve got that binary package, you can use the Debian standard tools to install it. (RPM is the same way.) Actually, you can install pre-compiled RPM packages but you’ll eventually run into issues. RPM is widely-adopted across the bazillion Linux distros, but none of them are equivalent: their RPMs don’t always work across distros. The interesting thing about this is that in some way it runs counter to the cathedral and the bazaar hypothesis: in this case, the cathedral — the single source — does a better job of making solid, well-documented code work than the bazaar — the wild and woolly world of linux. Learning this once was enough: I have no desire to work with linux again. Of the distros, Debian and Gentoo seem the most engaged in making support and upgrading relatively painless. To no one’s surprise, they lack the gleaming GUIs of RedHat and Mandrake. Darwin is experimenting with RPM and if anyone can make it work, Jordan Hubbard’s team can.