[o11c]

Note that I'm only talking about package-building itself here, not the practical distributions built thereupon; if that is considered, the tradeoffs are quite different. IMO the deb-using world is more useful than the rpm-using world, especially for non-server environments in particular. This is also where Nix beat Guix despite Nix's packaging language making TeX look sane.

But yes, RPM itself is better than Deb if only because there's a single .spec file rather than a sea of embedded nonsense. It's still not as nice as many "port" packaging systems (e.g. the BSDs, but also Gentoo), but most of those cheat by not having to deal with arbitrary binary packages. Still, binary packages are hardly an excuse for the ludicrous contortions the standard deb-building tools choose to require.