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Packaging report wrap-up

By Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier on February 22, 2007 (8:00:00 AM)

Over the last few days we've covered a wide range of software packaging and installation utilities. Some, like Autopackage, Klik, GoboLinux's packaging system, InstallJammer, and Zero Install are nascent solutions designed to make package creation, installation, and management simpler.

But no report on packaging would be complete without looking at the most common utilities in use today. We've looked at RPM's revival, Slackware's package utilities, and creating your own Debian packages. We didn't cover Gentoo's Portage this time around, but we have covered Portage recently and will continue to look in on Gentoo in the future.

Of all the special reports we've run, packaging has far and away outstripped other topics in terms of reader discussion. Bruce Byfield's piece on Autopackage, for example, has generated a great deal of insightful commentary (and a few trolls) about the state of packaging and whether Autopackage can solve some of the problems that Linux users are facing.

It's clear that there's a lot of interest in packaging on Linux, and a lot of interest in dealing with the less-than-optimal situation that exists now. We have a lot of interesting and innovative solutions for installing and managing software, but users and ISVs would clearly like a unified solution. While that may be in the works, it's going to be a long time coming.

As always, we'd like to get your feedback on the packaging report, and other special reports. Tell us what you liked, what you didn't, and what you'd like to see covered in the future. You can leave a comment here, or shoot us a reply via email. Thanks for reading!

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Hmm

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 05:06 AM

I think that it is good that you wrote these articles and brought the subject up.

I hope we can have an unified standardized package management thing, that would be really awesome.

Must suck for package maintainers to maintain packages for many different distributions and different formats.

Conclusions

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 23, 2007 05:02 PM

The current situation sucks because there are too many different packaging schemes.

The reason there are too many is that most distros have their own package repositories. (That is pretty much what defines a distro.) The package for an app contains the information "This app requires library FooBaz, version >= 2.2", but the answer to the question, "which packages provide library FooBaz?" varies from distro to distro. Finally, the way to ask that question varies from distro to distro.

And that is the underlying problem. It's easy to invent a new packaging scheme - that's why there are so many. It's also pointless, because there's no distro-independent way for an installer to ask, "which packages of this distro provide the library FooBaz version 2.2 or greater that this package needs?"

Fix that, and a large part of the packaging problem will go away because it will be so easy to solve. Writing an installer that installs a package of any type on any distro will become straightforward.

Unfortunately, that solution requires the leaders of the different distros to talk to each other in a spirit of reasonable cooperation. Getting that to happen is a really tough problem.

(Yes, I've omitted the other thing an installer needs to do - resolve conflicts. It's important, but it happens much less often than the missing-dependency problem.)