I'm both flattered and embarassed. rblcheck is in Debian proper (flattered), and I've never added dpkg support to the source tree (embarassed), although a kind soul within the Debian project did so already. So, I'm repenting by teaching myself about building dpkg packages, so that I can feel comfortable merging the work already done into the source tree; hopefully, I'll get around to cranking out an RPM spec file for it as well.
First impressions of the dpkg scheme: this feels almost exactly like RPM, except that everything is broken out into separate files (within a single directory), while RPM conviently (or inconveniently, depending on your point of view) keeps all additions tucked in a single file. In the long run, dpkg is probably more flexible (ie. would seem to handle future extending a little more gracefully), and gives package maintainers a standard place to tuck packaging-specific scripts and data. The documentation for dpkg seems to be a bit better too, but that's only because it seems to be current; RPM has a fine manual for it, but it's so out of date as to be useless.Fragmentation:
It seems a shame that the community has a tendancy for NIH (not invented here) syndrome; dpkg vs. RPM vs. ports vs. openpackages (etc), QT vs. GTK+, GNOME vs. KDE, Konqueror vs. Galeon vs. Mozilla, GNOME Office vs. OpenOffice vs. KOffice, etc. I've heard others say that the Linux community (using them as a generalization for GPL-using projects) doesn't have the same tendancy towards fragmentation that the BSD crowd have (again, generalizing for projects without viral licensing, using the FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD vs. NetBSD rift as their prime example), but it would seem to me from the prior examples that free software developers, in general, strive for reinvention and shun reuse.
Whether this is bad or not is a judgement call, and one that I haven't made myself yet; on one hand, it has resulted in some fantastic improvements to the existing "state of the art" (NCSA HTTPd vs. Apache, NCSA Mosaic vs. Mozilla, etc), but on the other hand, it has also resulted in replication of effort, often on a massive scale (XFree86 vs. Berlin, for example). It's also resulting in huge community rifts (GNOME vs. KDE, Samba vs. Samba TNG, OpenBSD vs. the world), which pundits could easily use as "representative examples" of our inability to collaborate.
What's my point? I don't really have one. I'm just thinking out loud, and hoping someone else has some thoughts on the subject.