I think RPM is also very convenient.
It is not important that you use what kind of method,some famous distrobutions even use bz2,but it is important that you make full use of it.
Yum——Yellow dog Updater, is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm。它和rpm的关系就如apt和deb。我也挺喜欢简单的包管理模式,像slackware的tgz。但yum确实是很好的工具。