Unifying Linux Package Management

Job Diogenes Ribeiro Borges writes "The Smart Package Manager is an intelligent tool that works on the 'dependency hell' of software upgrading and installation on linux. Works with all major distributions (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc), supporting multiple sources and technologies concurrently. Yes, you could install from multiple sources, from deb, rpm, tgz at same time! Smart Package Manager is being developed by Conectiva and is the tool that makes the Magic of CrossPlatform package management, behind the recently announced 'Four Linux Vendors Agree On An LSB Implementation.' You can get screenshots here (portuguese texts) and a README here."

Comments

What happens when they don't agree?

[Delphis]

What happens when Debian .debs and RedHat .rpms want to install to different places? If you installed as one type, would you be then forced into using the same type of archives every time?

For library locations, ld would probably take care of it.. I'm not sure I can think of any off the top of my head but there may be programs that rely on other components being in a certain place, and possibly barfing if they are not.

This is good

[skids]

Projects like this create a top-down pressure for packaging formats to standardize, adopt each other's features, and work on new features collaboratively. By having an developer community abstracting package formats and procedures, the package system authors get a comparative peer review, rather than just user feedback. This highlights the benefits and shortcomings of each packaging system in a much more impartial manner than any magazine review or forum discussion.

The GUI part of it really doesn't appeal to me. Lots of my machines are headless, and even with X11 I remote display don't particularly like the idea of installing umpteen X11 toolkits and support libraries on a router/fileserver/webserver just to support package management. It's good to see that they have commandline utilities as well.

Re:Politics

[lakeland]

*Giggle* debsums must be a figment of my imagination then... oh and apt-get.org must be too. Of course, with over three times the number of packages as RedHat you don't need to go elsewhere so often, but it is nice to know there's many hundreds of repositories listed. I know most of the sourceforge sites include a .rpm and not a .deb. Could it be because the package is already in debian? It's damn nice to never have to go searching for software.

Gee, I wonder what I have was smoking, that halucination has lasted for years, thanks for enlightening me! Oh, and next time, try getting a clue before you post... Hints #1: Try searching for library versioning if you want to find one of the problems with RPM. #2: yum still uses RPM and so it still has all the old problems with RPM.

Re:OSX

[Mornelithe]

If OSX is to be truly ready for the desktop, we need a system like in Linux. Something that is intuitive and simple as looking at a list of available applications of a type, picking the one I want, and clicking a button that says 'install'.

I don't want to have to go to a store and buy CDs or spend a long time searching Google for software that will run on my machine, then download an archive, and finally get the delivery media opened, and drag it somewhere on my hard drive.

Seriously, how is Drag-n-Drop easier than Select-n-Click? Of course, saying "OSX is good" is a safe bet here, because you'll automatically get modded up. I'm not saying OSX is hard, but Linux is not hard in this area either.