Debian vs. Redhat: Round 1: FIGHT!
It took me 2 hours to install pure-ftpd on RedHat 7.1 (a couple of months ago). I ran into all kinds of RPM hell up the wazoo and then gave up and did a source install.
It took me 1 minute to install pure-ftpd on Debian 3.0 testing.
WINNER: DEBIAN!