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 Policy!

[reynaert]

The Debian Policy manual is the reason behind apt-get's magic.

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.

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.