[H-GEN] package management systems.

[Stuart Longland]

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Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
| [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
| [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
|
| Bruce Campbell <bc at humbug.org.au> writes:
|
|
|> From the tone of replies Greg, you seem to have expressed a problem
|>without applying a bit of Common Sense.  Yes, most package management
|>tools do 'allow' packages to be installed from an arbitary filename, and
|>then 'insist' that you find out the proper name of the package before
|>uninstalling it.  Doing otherwise does not appear to be the 'Right Thing'
|>to do, and most (all?) package management systems seem to adhere to this.
|
|
| Well, to be completely fair, I shall point out that on a Debian by
| using apt and/or dselect, one never ever needs to deal with a
| package's file name at all.  So you can certainly say
|
|         apt-get install foo
|         apt-get remove foo
|
| without any worries.

Package management is a touchy issue.  Some package management systems
work better than others in different environments.  It isn't a problem
with just Linux, it applies to every operating system I know of.

I mainly use Red Hat Linux 8.0 these days although I have used SuSE and
~ Slackware in the past.  I can't comment on Debian as I'm not familiar
with the deb package manager system.

By far out of the OSes I've used, AtheOS/Syllable would, at the moment,
have the worst package management.  In fact, it doesn't have any package
manager as such, packages are unpacked into their own subdirectory and
the package is registered with the auto-linker so that its include,
binary and library files can be found.  This causes big headaches with
packages that have identical files.  (Apache and the Syllable API come
to mind).

The package management in Windoze isn't that great either.  The biggest
problem is that Windows still uses a package management system very
similar to DOS.  That is, every program basically has its own
installation and uninstallation program.  Very crude, very unreliable.
Micro$loth made a step in the right direction with the Windows Installer
(aka MSI) system, and with a bit of work, it could do almost as well as
RPM and other package management systems.

Slackware is just as crude, and lacks dependancy resolution.  It's
package management is largely based on shell scripts, in fact, one can
install a package two ways, via the shell scripts:
# installpkg <package_name>

or by decompressing it in / and running the install script:
# cd / ; tar -xzvf $OLDPWD/<package_name>
# sh install/doinst.sh

I've found that with Slackware Linux, it is often easier to download
source code and compile it myself as the configure script will often
tell me about dependency issues much faster than it takes me to piss
fart around trying to guess what package I need when I get the dreaded
message:
	Failed to load shared object: Failed to load shared object: No such
file or directory

(I can't remember exact wording, it didn't mention any file name - Very
Helpful)

The Slackware method is nice however because it is very easy to add and
remove packages that you've installed manually, and also it's very easy
to make your own packages.  I actually wrote a perl script that would
create the packages from source code.  It worked by grabbing a list of
files before you ran 'make install' then grabbed a second list after,
and compared the two lists.  Any new files were added to the package.

RPM is nice and simple to use, hence why many distros use it.  AFAIK, it
is used by Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake, ASPLinux, Connectiva Linux,
and many others.  Others such as Slackware include support for RPM, but
don't actually use it natively.  It's very easy to install and remove
packages via RPM.  My only complaint is that it doesn't go looking for
dependant files that have been installed from another source.  (this
somewhat breaks RPM under Slackware)

Well, that's my 0.022c (GST inclusive) worth.
- --
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##**++--             Stuart Longland             --++**##
##**++--          http://stuartl.cjb.net/        --++**##
##**++--                                         --++**##
##**++--      Longland Clan @ Brismesh (719)     --++**##
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