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sintactika
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Joined: 18 Aug 2011
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:05 pm    Post subject: Distfiles, ebuild, rpm, deb Reply with quote

I'd like to know the difference between a distfile and an ebuild, are they the same? What extentions do they have? What is the difference between .rpm and .deb?
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sintactika,

Welcome to Gentoo.

An ebuild file is a bash script with the extension .ebuild. It contains the recipie to build a package and provides the package manager with a list of other packages that the given package depends on.
The means when you choose to install a package, the package manager will also install all required dependencies too.

A distfile (sometimes more than one) provides the ingredients that the recipie requires. They can have any extension but they are normally a collection of compressed test files, known as tarballs from the program used to create them. Tar stands for Tape ARchive, which collects lost of files into one big file. The big file is then compressed using something like bzip, bzip2, lmza and so on.
This makes it smaller and saves everyones internet bandwidth.

The ebuilds and distfiles are not the same. The ebuild describes to the package manager what to do with the distfiles.

.rpm and .deb are package formats for Red Hat Package Manager and Debian respectively.

RPM files contain some payload package and some metadata. The payload can be a group of files. The metadata tells the RPM program what to do with the payload. .deb files are similar in concept but differ in detial.

Roughly, you could liken .rpm and .deb files to and .ebuild with its distfiles. A dey difference is that the .ebuild describes to the package manager how to get the distfiles.
This means that most Gentoo installs have a complete set of .ebuilds but only the distfiles actually in use.
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