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

Debian is almost perfect...

[Froze]

Except that there needs to be a catagory entry. What I mean is a way of getting all similar types of packages. For instance suppose I wanted to look at all thing "word processing", then I would get packages ranked from most applicable (open office, abiword, etc) down to quasi applicable ( vi, gnotepad, hexedit, etc).

What I've Loved

[MBCook]

I've used many many distros over the last few years, and I can tell you the things I like easily. Below are some of my top ones:

• Dependencies - This is probably the most important for me. The thing that makes apt so great is that it can do dependencies. Gentoo's emerge also does a great job of this. I haven't used an RPM distro in about 2 years, but back then they didn't do anything but complain that you needed some other package. YOU had to go find it. YOU had to go install it. YOU had to get IT'S dependencies, etc. It meant installing one package could take forever.
• Source - I like being able to easily build from source. With RPMs (at least in my expirence) it would build the package, then put it in some odd location and you'd then have to "rpm -Uvh" (or whatever) from there. Gentoo does a great job of this, but it's a source distro ;). Basically, when I install from source, it should install the package for me. If I only want to make some kind of binary that I can distribute, that should be a seperate command.
• Compatibility - RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's .tgz files. They are nothing but a .tar.gz with some extra info, so no matter what system you use, you could just download the slackware .tgz and use it, right? Gentoo doesn't have packages, but "ebuilds". These are nice because they are small little text files, and your computer goes and fetches the latest version of the package (or whatever version is specified). It uses the standard source and it gets it the same way you might.
• The Unistall - This can be a PAIN. This is the one feature that, IMHO, makes packages better than source. If this doesn't work, why not take the extra 3 steps to use source? When I uninstall something it should be removed completely. No empty directories, it should offer to remove it's config files or back them up, it should offer to restore any files that it's changed, etc. Both Debian and Gentoo do a great job with this. I don't remember what it's like with RPMs very well.

I'll post more if I can think of them. Why does constructive criticism have to be so much harder than normal criticism? He he he. I talk alot about Debian and Gentoo because those are the two distros that I use regularly, and the package systems are a big reason for that. Packaging makes a difference. I'd probably run Mandrake if it wasn't RPM based. It's a great distro, but I just CAN'T STAND RPMs. Are they much better now than a year or two or three ago? Almost certanly. But I've been so soured to them by my expirence, it will be quite a while before I try them again; especially since I found apt and emerge.

The packager means more than the package system.

[cornice]

I've had success with RPMs, DEBs, EBuilds, etc. What really makes the biggest difference is the packager. Most major distros have pretty good package maintainers now. This wasn't always the case.

Now for me it's all about convenience. If I can use Debian, Gentoo or Mandrake+Ximian Red Carpet and keep my system up to date on a daily basis then I'm happy. This requires good packages and good mirrors. I throw Ximian in there becuase I've had a terrible time with Mandrake mirrors. Also if I can upgrade without running an install from CD then I'm happy. Debian and Gentoo seem to do this quite well. If I can avoid conflicts and install a couple versions of the same thing and keep it all straight, then I'm really happy. Gentoo seems to be making strides towards the last one but compiling everything isn't always an option.

Better front ends

[0x0d0a]

I'd like to see front ends be a bit better. I was quite impressed with apt-get, and use it with RPMs on a RH system. RH's up2date is really awful -- it's sluggish, doesn't give much feedback on what's going on, fragile (rpm hangs or a download fails, and it isn't very smart about it), doesn't resume failed transfers, and doesn't let you download non-RH packages. It simply feels flaky, which is not good for a tool that, for many users, may be their only look into the management of their system.

Oh, and it grabs an exclusive lock on the rpmdb the entire time the thing is downloading. I *really* think this is a bad idea -- at the very least, there should be an option to flip this off. Novice users aren't going to be running rpm manually anyway at the same time, and more experienced users *really* get annoyed when they can't query or modify in unrelated ways the system while up2date is slowly sucking something down over a modem.

Apt-get is nice...if there isn't something like it, it might be a good idea to have a Red Carpet-like GUI for it to make it really appealing to new users. Hell, most people don't use Windows Update because they consider it too intimidating or don't know about it...

Re:Rollback.

[__past__]

Something similar: It would be nice if the package management system would remember what I only installed as a dependency of something else, and would remove it when I deinstall the other package (after asking me, of course).