My Linux experience/knowledge is limited, but I've read quite a bit on tons of distros and their differences.
Synaptic/APT seems to be the king of package management today, but I wonder about the future? Maybe someone can explain why, but the Debian based distros tend to be locked into systems where upgrading requires a new install, and then still can't be kept up to date. By the time Ubuntu 7.04 comes out with the 2.6.20 kernel, it will already be out of date, and Ubuntu systems won't be able to upgrade till 7.10. (If I understood correctly.)
So I'm just curious what else might become king in the future?
Pacman- Arch Linux's package manager is a bit more complex in a sense, they claim it simpler, but it allows quick rolling distributions of updates, even kernels without reinstallation, and lets their systems have the leading edge of new releases. The problem is that Arch Linux is intentionally opposed to making the distro as a whole simple for beginners. Maybe someone will eventually take the Arch Pacman base and add the GUI goodness of Ubuntu/Mint. Every review of Arch seems to claim it the best Linux ever - because no beginners ever review it or try it. Eventually I'll have to make a partition to try it. I'm not sure I'd even succeed in the installation alone.
Conary - Rpath's package management, also used by Foresight. Seems like it could eventually be better than APT, but per most reviews, not yet.
Klik - maybe the easiest way to run somethings, but not to the exclusion of some all-purpose package management. Supposedly installs and isolates all dependencies together in one place, easy to remove.
CNR - Should be in Ubuntu 7.04 and so maybe Mint 3.0. I guess we will see. Currently an addition, not a replacement for APT.
Installjammer- something else I read about that maybe useful in the future. I didn't read enough to understand it.
What is the future of package management?
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What is the future of package management?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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I'm not an expert when it comes to that. However, my views on it are not that DEB is better than RPM, but that APT is faster and more suitable than any other RPM based package manager I've tried.
I found the Fedora and SUSE package managers to be flexible and full of great features, however they were slow and not as straight forward.. so they couldn't compete with APT.
Mandrake's package manager is fast but they don't have the same collection of packages that Debian has and I was confused with the way they manage different versions for a same package.
I don't think it actually matters whether the packages are RPMs or DEBs, but more so what the package manager does and how fast and comfortable it is to use it and configure it.
Clem
I found the Fedora and SUSE package managers to be flexible and full of great features, however they were slow and not as straight forward.. so they couldn't compete with APT.
Mandrake's package manager is fast but they don't have the same collection of packages that Debian has and I was confused with the way they manage different versions for a same package.
I don't think it actually matters whether the packages are RPMs or DEBs, but more so what the package manager does and how fast and comfortable it is to use it and configure it.
Clem
SuSE's "smart" can handle many many repo types: yum, apt, YasT, rpm, deb .... It's just a matter of configuring it. The syntax of the "smart" command is similar enough to "apt" (e.g. "smart update", "smart install packagename", etc.) so it's not that hard to switch to it if you have to. "smart -gui" is very similar to "synaptic". And "smart" is not that slow. My repo list here is huge and I am quite satisfied with the speed. Although I have to admit it isn't as fast as "apt" it's not that bad ...carltonh wrote:I left them out because I haven't heard of anything about them that may make them better than APT in the future.
Clem is right about "yum", e.g. on Fedora: It's sloooooow.
EDIT: What about Gentoo? Gentoo and "emerge" rock
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