What Package Management Features Do You Value?

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?"

Comments

Tip for RPM users

[0x0d0a]

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.

checkinstall

[swillden]

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.