From: Vincent Fourmond <vincent.fourmond@9online.fr>
Date: 2007-01-14T04:03:19+09:00
Subject: Re: A Heartfelt Plea for a Universal Open Source Package Management System [was Re: Tattle - The Ruby Census]

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Red Hat has proved in spades that this is something people will pay cold
> hard cash for. No matter what anyone thinks about the superiority of
> "apt" or Portage or anything else, RPM, up2date and yum are as close to
> a "universal" open source package management system as I've been able to
> find so far. You can load an RPM on a Debian or Gentoo box and tell the
> local package manager that you've thus satisfied all the dependencies
> that package satisfies. So -- why can't a Gem in fact be an RPM? Why
> can't a Perl package, an R package, etc. be an RPM? Why does everyone
> have to re-invent the package management system, especially when Red Hat
> placed RPM and most of its infrastructure under GPL years ago?

  I understand what you mean but there is need for a much better
infrastructure, then. Gems allow install to personal directories, for
instance, which RPM and DEBs obviously can't provide. Moreover, where
would you put manpages for a personal installation ?

  Then, there is the so called 'maintainer scripts', that is the ones
which are dealing with updating /etc/... configuration files, setting up
rc.* bootup links, registering fonts, making stuff available for
menus... That's not a simple thing.

  BTW, apt is also GPLed... Like many other package managing systems
;-)... I'm every time sceptical about one-for-all solutions: either they
don't work for everyone, either they're too complex no one will ever
choose to move from their current way system to the ultimate solution...

  Cheers,

	Vince


-- 
Vincent Fourmond, PhD student
http://vincent.fourmond.neuf.fr/