[matt__rose]

Mostly it's a matter of picking your poison. dpkg allows some things that RPM doesn't, and vice-versa. dpkg does have some nice features (well, features I can't remember, except for I went "Ooo, I want rpm to have that" when I saw it)

One thing that dpkg has that really annoys the hell out of me is allowing for user input during the transaction. It makes unattended upgrades impossible

[YokoZar]

In general Debian/Ubuntu packages do not prompt the user with debconf questions these days, although there are occasional leftovers in old packages if you upgrade via a terminal with apt-get update.

You can define an environment variable, DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, to force even the worst-behaved packages to never ask a question.

[tene]

You can set those configurations, certainly, but it's up to the package maintainer to actually respect them. At my previous company, I occasionally ran into packages that insisted on trying to read from the terminal, even when installed noninteractively, with all configuration flags set to noninteractive. I can understand the potential appeal for a lone individual working with a small number of hand-maintained systems, but when working with a large cluster, interaction during package operations is just a horrible misfeature.