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What Package Management Features Do You Value?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-should-a-good-installer-work dept.

0x0d0a asks: "Slashdot has now had a number of articles on package management. Strong opinions about the management approaches of Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, and BSD have all been expressed, some quite negative. What suggestions do you have for improvement? What features do you value in a package management system, and in what areas would you like to see additional functionality?"

5 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. uPM... by DarkBlack · · Score: 2, Informative

    Many may not have had the pleasure of using uPM yet. It is a new package manager that seems to be very well thought out and seems to be heavily bassed on dpkg and ebuild/emerge. It represents the best features of both. It aims to simplify the build process and allow for binary packages to be built from the customized build process.

    I would look for uOS, the distribution based on the package manager to rise above either Debian or Gentoo (both of which I love, btw). It is still early in development, but it seems to work well for me.

  2. Tip for RPM users by 0x0d0a · · Score: 5, Informative

    RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's .tgz files.

    And some things aren't RPM-packaged.

    One tool that *no* RPM user should be without, IMHO, is checkinstall. This runs a normal "make install" after you're done with ./configure and make, but monitors what locations files are being "install"ed to. It then builds an RPM package and installs it. This lets you cleanly uninstall tarballs, and handles library dependencies. In many ways, it gives you the flexibility of Slackware's approach with the nice features of RPM.

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  3. Re:I've said this before, but... by __past__ · · Score: 3, Informative
    There's little point standardising on rpm (because thats what the LSB says) or any other package management system unless packages are named consistently.
    I'd say that is a specific problem of RPM (or the way it's used in practice). It could simple look for an executable perl$PERLVERSION in $PATH, or even test the output of perl --version or something.

    On the other hand, you'd better know when to stop with this, or you'll end up reinventing autoconf...

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  4. checkinstall by swillden · · Score: 4, Informative

    It may be just me, but I never bothered to build my own RPMs or DEBs when I was using Linux.

    I nearly *always* build DEBs for my Debian boxes (well, for the occasional app that Debian hasn't already packaged), and I've never bothered to learn how debs are made. How? checkinstall

    To use it, you just run:

    ./configure <appropriate opts> && make && sudo checkinstall

    checkinstall will run "make install" for you, but will do it in a chroot environment, see what got installed where, build you a DEB that will do it and then run "dpkg -i" to automatically install the DEB for you.

    And, of course, "aptitude purge <pkgname>" will get rid of it all.

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  5. Re:Debian is almost perfect... by novakreo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Except that there needs to be a catagory entry.

    Easy: Install the aptitude front-end (apt-get install aptitude) and select New Categorical Browser from the Views menu.

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