ianmurdock.com — Ian Murdock, former lead developer of Debian and now Sun employee, expresses his thoughts about package management's impact on bringing Linux to wider audience, and how it is suppose to do the same with OpenSolaris.
Jul 22, 2007 View in Crawl 4
vitalstatistixJul 23, 2007
Am 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?
trogdoorJul 23, 2007
That 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?
greyfadeJul 23, 2007
I'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.
zerblatJul 23, 2007
You can use apt pinning to set different priorities for different package sources: <a class="user" href="http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html">http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html</a>
ademanJul 23, 2007
I'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)
itomatoJul 23, 2007
OK, why?