What is Digg?38 Comments
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18But do they want "wider audience" for OpenSolaris ?
Because i have found Linux community very very helpful when i converted to it.
I found Solaris community totally opposite, their chauvinistic attitude is so strong, makes me love Linux even more.
But then it is just my opinion. - perlhacker14, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Yes, these days, package maneagement is the subject on many forums when deciding on a good distro. I personally like Debian's easy system, and Slackware's simple but powerful tgz as well. To me, I personally dislike rpm, but that could be because I dislike fedora...
Of course, the good old source packages cannot be forgotten!
As to solaris, if solaris were to create a good packaging system its adoption would definetely increase, and it would be a lot nicer to use and maintain. Though I must say that the solaris community might halt its advances with its attitude. - lengau, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8I think it's because they want to keep using their tools.
I don't see why having Linux(GNU), Solaris, and BSD is a bad thing. most well-written high-level apps will work on all three with little code change,and it's good to have different OS's, because they each do something better (for example: If I want to run something on a tiny device with very little memory/storage, I'll probably consider NetBSD, but if I'm on a Desktop, right now I'm most likely to use Linux). - williamdyer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7They ARE "joining." Solaris will be, effectively, an alternative kernel. You could, if you can tolerate the roughness of current builds, go to the Debian repositories, make yourself a system with a GNU Herd kernel.
- sowdog, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8Package management in linux is awesome. Sometimes i iwish they'd have something like that for my apps in windows so i can get automatically update to the latest releases.
- sirhomer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I've never had a problem with a broken package in Ubuntu, maybe you should submit a bug report?
- williamdyer, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Sun is a very ***** up company. But they have recently done a number of things to change that. While a lot of people, many of them ex-employees, write them off, I'm willing to see if they can turn it around.
It would be good for computing if OpenSolaris is a success. - Kratos76, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Oh, I thought this was like a UPS or DHL article... conveyor belts, bar codes... you know, package management!
- Fartag, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3For me it's the sheer convenience of it on many fronts.
1) All of the software is in one place, directly listed, scroll to entry of interest type of thing (no ads, no clutter, software is safe)
2) All software listed can be installed, uninstalled, auto-upgraded (no need to remember to), reinstalled, held for now, held until specified otherwise, all easily from the same place.
3) The packages are clean in terms of tracking where their contents got installed to, uninstalls are clean, libraries with nobody depending on them can be safely removed...
Also the optional configure file purges are nice
4) You can search in package manager by name of the package or its description or other things, this is great since it saves trips to google / sourceforge / etc.
5) Package configure file management (reconfigure) for many packages but I haven't used this as much
Packages are great by themselves, make-kpkg is great for compiling Linux kernel / modules into a package too.. - jdhore1, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I've never had a problem with a broken package in a debian-based distro...You can always do: apt-get -f install and it'll fix the dependencies or uninstall your package if it can't...Also, if you try upgrading a package and it breaks, you can always go to packages.ubuntu.com or packages.debian.org, download the old version of the broken package and use dpkg to install it...or you can force the install if dpkg is giving you hell.
- JonLatane, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I love Linux package management, but I wish there were hierarchies of repositories. For example, it's cool that a library from Debian's main repository can be used and required by a package in a different repo, but it would be cool if other repositories couldn't upgrade packages to a version that breaks the system. Usually it's reversible with a bit of patience, but it can get really, really crazy. And sometimes, what you want/need just isn't in the main repo - not to mention the fact that a central source for all your software kind of goes against the choice that Linux stands for.
- dgh1973, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2No offense to him, and I love his work and all... but isn't he plugging himself a little too hard by basically pushing apt as the "biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry"?
Even though he wasn't personally responsible for writing apt, it just came out a little self-serving to me.
I'd say the biggest advancement Linux brought to the industry - albeit indirectly - was Apache. - LANjackal, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2He's right, package management IS the best thing to have happened to Linux.. deb files are also another incredible advancement.
- vitalstatistix, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Am I the only one who thinks that most distros would cease to exist if they all used the same package manager? I mean, wouldn't it be great if the only difference btn distros was the version of a pkg/lib? I can dream cant I?
- init100, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2What is it that you specifically dislike about Fedora?
- trogdoor, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That would be great, how should this single package management system be designed so that it satisfies everyone's needs? All you have to do after all is make a package management system that Tracks your needs and compiles every singe package with only the features you need changing the dependencies of that package as needed, supports easy and simple binary package installation for any package ( while also being compatible with the packages that you compiled yourself even though it needs to link to those packages without being compiled for them ) to save time and keep dependency resolution less complicated and work well with rolling releases and work well with stable version releases that may be years apart and have to be upgraded all at once *without breakage*. Most of all it must be simple stable and maintainable. There you go, easy isn't it?
- keviniskool, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2What's the point of solaris again?
- trogdoor, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1"it would be cool if other repositories couldn't upgrade packages to a version that breaks the system." This should never happen, if it does then the the maintainers of one or the other of the repositories ( almost always the third party repos though... ) screwed up royally. The whole point of tracking dependencies is that all meta data being correct the package manager should know when a certain change will break another package, and shouldn't allow it to happen.
- ldog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I don't think the wheel needs to be reinvented, but one of the two major players needs lose the ego. Having both .deb and .rpm doesn't do either side any good.
I've been a redhat user since 5.1 and I would be completely ok with them switching to .deb. I don't believe .deb is superior to rpm or vice versa, either format coupled with apt or yum does what I need it to do. Why have both? - generalloy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I think conary (Foresight Linux/rPath) has something like that. They have a versioning tracker and distributed repositories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conary_%28package_manager%29
http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary - Ademan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I've never had to deal with it, and I assume it's been fixed for a long time, but i hear occasional references to "rpm hell" which i believe referred to users having to manually resolve dependencies. But again, if I'm not mistaken that's no longer an issue, I frankly haven't strayed far from Ubuntu since i first picked it up. (the Freesbie liveCD was about as adventurous as i got)
- adrianmonk, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1You could say that, but Apache started as a fork to NCSA httpd. I believe it forked between version 1.3 and 1.4 of NCSA httpd. (I specifically remember, because we were running either 1.2 or 1.3, and I suggested to my boss we should switch to Apache. He rejected the idea because NCSA was more mainstream.) Anyway, the vast majority of the people at the time ran both NCSA httpd and Apache httpd on commercial Unix systems. Linux was fairly new, and while it was viable as an operating system, PC hardware hadn't really caught up that well with RISC machines. People who needed fast web servers bought SGI machines running IRIX because MIPS processors were so fast, and they had good I/O. Or AIX or Sun OS 4.x (most people avoided 5.x back then) or even Ultrix or HP-UX.
Sure, Linux is a popular platform to run Apache on *now*, and it works well for that, but Linux did not bring us Apache. - greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I've *seen* these before. It's powdered laundry detergent from Scandinavia. (Not sure where, specifically.) A guy was using one as a tote bag at LinuxFest NorthWest a couple years back.
- zerblat, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1You can use apt pinning to set different priorities for different package sources: http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html
- itomato, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0It's easy to get into a dependency goose chase, especially if there is a minor difference in version number, or package branch (stable/unstable/testing), or you "cross the streams" and use packages from one derivative on another (Debian packages on Knoppix, Ubuntu packages on Debian, SuSE on Fedora).
Once people can either be isolated or trained that there are new complexities to software management as it is today, things could clear up and the package managaer can do its job. It's not common that you can download a single RPM or deb of a program and expect it to install and give you an application to run. It's a little easier in Solaris, because the packages come from single streams (blastwave, sun, sun cfw/sfw), but without addressing applications as "Meta-packages", with all requirements taken into consideration, things are very much "Trial and Error".
To be honest, though, it's not a bad way to come up. - itomato, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Solaris was a 64-bit UNIX while Linux was being installed from individual tarballs.
Once your scalability requirements and budgetary baselines outpace and drawf your current option, you might look to Solaris.
There is a point where the amount of time spent "getting Linux to do something" outweighs in terms of cost in dollars and time, that using something like Solaris makes sense. Rather than spend time getting something like RHEL or Debian to perform like Solaris does out of the chute, you could implement what you would otherwise be designing.
That logic isn't specific to Solaris of course. It's a common arguement or plea for using Linux systems over Windows systems. - diggmystuff, on 10/10/2007, -4/+4good ole software suppositories...i mean repositories...
- cuekay, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1I don't understand really why package management is so great, albeit I've been using slack since 1993, I've never had a problem downloading and compiling from source, and when a new release comes out, if it's so fantastic that i MUST use it, I would download it and compile again. I'm not one of those who thinks compiling from source makes the app run faster, but I like the fact that I can compile out features I'm never going to use.
- itomato, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0OK, why?
- manicallday, on 10/10/2007, -4/+3I love my rpms.
- adrianmonk, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0Well, for one thing, it had package management before Linux did. Solaris 2.x was based on UNIX System V R4 and was jointly developed with AT&T Bell Labs. SVR4 came out in 1990, and as far as I know it had the familiar pkgadd, pkgrm, pkginfo, and pkgmk commands (that it has now) back then. Solaris came out in 1992 and should have had those commands as well since it was, in effect, the primary implementation of SVR4. Meanwhile, Linux was at version 0.01 or so back then.
No, it didn't have a whole bunch of stuff to download updates from network repositories at the time (many sites weren't even on the Internet at the time), but it had the basics. - DonCarcharo, on 10/10/2007, -6/+4I guess I'm in the minority here but I find Linux package management, of any sort, to be less than pleasurable. Sure apt is nice when everything works. RPMs are great when there's no dependancy issues. But the other 99% of the time it all falls apart. There's nothing quite like playing, "hunt down the obscure libraries until your install actually works". I love that game. I played it once with Plesk on Ubuntu for two hours across twenty five install attempts. Good fun.
So yeah give me Windows' double-clickable executables or the Mac's venerable self-contained packages any day over the disjointed effort that is Linux package management. - tonytao, on 10/10/2007, -3/+0As someone (or many people) said recently, why don't they simply join the Linux push? They reinvent a wheel here and they start with rubber (also because of licences).
- schestowitz, on 10/11/2007, -10/+6FTA: 'So, the next time you read about how Project Indiana aims to make Solaris more “Linux-like”, keep in mind that what we’re actually “copying” is the distro model, not Linux itself—which, after all, is a kernel, and has nothing to do with the package management and so forth the distros (you know, like Debian) built above it.'
As someone (or many people) said recently, why don't they simply join the Linux push? They reinvent a wheel here and they start with rubber (also because of licences). - speuzer, on 10/10/2007, -6/+1"Your mom goes to college" girl is hot
- avions, on 10/10/2007, -7/+2I was expecting a story on Supply Chain or Condoms.
Check out the new & improved 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is