After spending years messing with RPM packages in the sysadmin world, I now breathe a sigh of relief with Arch/pacman. Building/maintaining/installing RPMs is painful compared to Arch or Debian's dpkg.
Best command ever...
From your comment it seems SuSE must have improved since 2005. I didn't follow them for long time now. It's Arch or Debian for me these days.
The startup costs to Debian packaging are greater. In the most basic case not that much greater--a single control file with intuitive fields, and a rules file (i.e. Makefile) with intuitive targets. However, to do things according to best practice (i.e. official Debian policy) often requires using additional tools and configuration files. So, yeah, it can become byzantine. But if you realize that it all comes back to generating that control file and rolling up a target directory, same as RPM, it can be easier to make sense of everything.
The important distinction is that all the complexity, required and optional, in Debian packaging can be hidden within the confines of the packaging framework. That is, whatever your build rules and workarounds, anyone trying to build your package can just invoke a standard dpkg build without having to understand any of it. Working around deficiencies in RPM often requires adding and exposing additional layers of complexity, like generating spec files in ad hoc pipelines before a user can invoke rpmbuild.
For example, do you autogenerate your RPM package version from the source? How do you embed it within the spec file? And are you able to also generate a source tarball that can generate the same build? It's one thing to cobble together an RPM that explodes to some binaries; it's another to do so in an automated fashion that's also transparent--i.e. generates SRPMS that can be built within clean environments. I know, I know, CI/CD systems can obviate the need to build binary RPMs from SRPMs, but that's exactly my point. RPM alone is seriously deficient. There are lots of little problems like this that pop up when your needs become more complex; you end up building taller towers of complexity than what would be needed using Debian.
That said, rpmbuild has grown features over the years to make it more compatible with that model.
My experience with RPMs, Debian packages, and various other formats has led me to prefer some of the rigidity and explicitness of rpmspec over the sprawl of automagic that is a debian/ tree, and other similar things. But if you want to do weird things to build packages, nothing stops you from doing that and using a trivial spec file as the intermediate to pass instructions to rpmbuild to wrap it up.
The format is not perfect, but I haven't seen anyone make any proposals recently about how to improve it on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list, the rpm-maint mailing list, the rpm project on GitHub, or at any of the developer conferences where rpm developers show up.
You seem to have a ton of knowledge and opinions, why not engage with the project?
rpm hell was the Dark Ages of FOSS, and I'm so glad that the community has resolved that problem. However, the bitter taste still lingers and for this reason I will never take rpm files seriously again.
I don't have much experience with them but I was under the impression than just writing a specfile and calling rpmbuild was a step up compared to debian, which seems a mess to me with the makefiles and other stuff all over the place and all those dpkg commands which are wrappers for each other.
- yum/dnf take extraordinary amounts of time compared to apt
- debs are all in one source. Upstream sources are clean, predictable, and easy to troubleshoot.
You can also revert multiple transactions at once, e.g. restore the package versions to what they were three months ago.
There's nothing remotely like this in apt -- if you install a lot of packages on your system, and then want to remove them, the common solution is something like "parse the (text) apt logs, learn manually what's changed, and revert it yourself".
Some other niceties:
* package groups: `dnf install @'c development'` instead of `apt install binutils gcc make bison yacc whatever-else`. Somewhat mitigated by metapackages, but they rarely cover the whole groups of functionality, i.e. they are often more low-level.
* package streams: `dnf install node-8`, or `node-9`, or one of the other supported versions;
* dnf downloads many packages in parallel, and the level of parallelism is configurable. This greatly helps with upgrades from slow mirrors. I believe it can also utilize multiple mirrors at once, though I haven't tried it.
* dnf supports plugins and you can install them with a simple command. For example, there's a plugin to automatically create btrfs snapshots on every package upgrade.
* COPR saved my skin a couple of times, though it's basically the same thing as Ubuntu's PPAs. This is more of a problem for Debian.