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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?"

1 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --
    May we never see th