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Packaging special report

By Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier on February 12, 2007 (8:00:00 AM)

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Linux users are blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a wide array of choices for software installation and management -- better known as packaging tools. Over the next few days, we're going to look at some of the packaging options for Linux to provide a useful overview of the packaging landscape.

A few weeks ago Bruce Byfield covered the Free Standards Group's plans for a cross-format API that may provide tools to simplify installation of software across multiple distros for ISVs. Until those tools come to fruition, though, ISVs -- and users -- will have to cope with a landscape that is less than unified, but full of interesting options.

Today Byfield covers the Autopackage project, and examines why Autopackage has failed to take the Linux world by storm.

We'll also take a look at Klik, GoboLinux's package management, the future of RPM, Zero Install, creating packages for Debian and Ubuntu, and more.

If you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to see covered in a special report, drop us a note and tell us all about it. We'd also like to know what you'd like more of in the special reports. Do you prefer news and interviews with developers who shape the technologies, or hands-on howtos, or a little of both? Send us an email or leave a comment -- and, as always, thanks for reading.

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on Packaging special report

Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.

Curse

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 13, 2007 06:13 AM
I think its a curse.

We need interoperability.
We need a unified standard.

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Re:Curse

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 13, 2007 06:18 PM
Why do you? Once you choose your distro, you just stick to its packaging format, that's all. You don't need to learn thousands of command-line commands. Or do you change distro everyday and ignore Synaptics/Adept/Smart/Yast/other GUIs?

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Re:Curse

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 13, 2007 11:47 PM
Its a curse for the package maintainers, who instead of have to maintain just one package, have to maintain a dozen.

Its a curse for me, when a package is not in the repository, then it might not be available a package for my distro.

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