The Future of Packaging Software in Linux

michuk writes "There are currently at least five popular ways of installing software in GNU/Linux. None of them are widely accepted throughout the popular distributions. This situation is not a problem for experienced users — they can make decisions for themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, installing new software is always pretty confusing. The article tries to sum up some of the recent efforts to fix this problem and examine the possible future of packaging software in GNU/Linux."

Comments

Hasn't explored other packaging methods

[shermozle]

(while discussing RPM)

Still, a lot of other systems like Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo or Linspire do not use the RPM format and do not plan to incorporate it. What that means is he hasn't used any other packaging formats. Common mistake that people think RPM is somehow "best" because it's used by a few distros. Do some searches for "circular dependency RPM" to see why that's just not true.

Re:Hasn't explored other packaging methods

[DoubleRing]

Hear hear! I have mod points, but I'd rather post.

Circular dependencies, aka RPM hell, is what actually prompted me to make the switch from the Red Hat family to the Debian family. I used to be a pretty die hard Red Hat user. It used to be that Fedora was the cutting edge, back in the core 2 and 3 days. I would have those days when I would wrestle with the packages, but I just took my hits and moved on. Then Ubuntu came along, and I realized how much time I was wasting with that stuff. It "just works." APT is great (it's a pity POSIX decided to go for RPM). Gentoo's portage is really cool too, but IALAB (I'm a lazy bum--if you can't reconcile the acronym, then you probably shouldn't know what the missing word is).

Re:The solution!

[Max Littlemore]

Using multiple package formats is great idea, IMO. I use alien on Ubuntu for those situations where the software I want is only avaliable in RPM, but as it says in the summary, new users can be a bit confused by this and building from sources is often too much. I would like to see GUI tools get the smarts to automatically figure out dependencies across all formats, allowing all distros to become package agnostic. Perhaps Linspire's CNR interace would be a good candidate for this.

Also, the option to resolve dependencies and install as a statically linked blob would be awesome for legacy stuff. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to install an app, only to find that it relies on some obscure version of xyz.so and won't work, so I find the source for the old version of xyz, only to find it depends on some older version of abc.so. If I could get this xyz.so, etc without conflicting with that xyz.so, create a static binary and put it somewhere under /opt, I'd be happy. I know it's not elegant, and that it uses more storage, but as a work around for difficult to support stuff, it ain't so bad when storage is cheap. Some apps I always install as blobs anyway, such as blender.

BTW, from TFA: Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed
Slashdotted :-(

Re:How about we take the easy way out?

[QuantumG]

Apt rules, shame about dpkg. Even bigger shame that apt is built on dpkg, eh?

What pisses me off is the 32 step process to making a deb (that's what dpkg calls a package btw.. just incase you're playing acronym bingo out there). So if you want to install something you built from source, and be able to remove it later, you need some freakin' magician to have made it into a source package.. cause there's no way in hell you're doing it yourself.

What really depresses me is that debs, dpkg and apt, that's about the best anyone has done. Unless, of course, you actually like building everything from source.

You want "checkinstall".

[khasim]

What pisses me off is the 32 step process to making a deb (that's what dpkg calls a package btw.. just incase you're playing acronym bingo out there). So if you want to install something you built from source, and be able to remove it later, you need some freakin' magician to have made it into a source package.. cause there's no way in hell you're doing it yourself.

Checkinstall http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/147

It's not the answer to all issues regarding installing from source ... but it does handle some of them.

What really depresses me is that debs, dpkg and apt, that's about the best anyone has done.

Any suggestions on what would make them even better?

A total load of bullshit, and here's why

[Overly Critical Guy]

My favorite thing in package discussions is when someone with an agenda towards a particular implementation writes out a list of steps. The alternative is always padded with extra steps to make it more difficult-looking while their favored implementation is reduced to look squeaky clean and easy.

You padded the Mac list with the following:

• "Open disk image that contains the program." - DMGs are auto-mounted by Safari.
• "Open Applications folder." - There's already an Applications shortcut on the Finder, so you just drag to that when the disk image window automatically opens.
• "Create new icon in dock." - The fuck? You don't have to do this
• "Have to recheck the site periodically to check for a update for a specific program" - Bullshit. This doesn't even have to do with package management, and it's an OS X convention for apps to auto-check for updates when they're run. You don't have to recheck any websites.

Your Debian list conveniently leaves out having to click the KDE start menu, fire up a Terminal window, type in the root password, waiting while the package manager goes through dependencies, etc. What a phony comparison of steps. I could just have easily reduced OS X's step to one line of "Drag app icon to Applications shortcut" in the same the way you reduced Debian's steps.

Re:The solution!

[ElleyKitten]

Last time I tried Ubuntu apt-get package_i_want failed to locate the program more than half the time.

When you use the command line you have to make sure you spell the package name exactly right, for example "sudo apt-get install flash" won't work, but "sudo apt-get install flash-nonfree" does. Synaptic has a really good search feature that I use when i don't know the exact name. If Ubuntu really doesn't have half the programs you want, then what programs do you use and how do you normally get them?

Relying on distros for your software has lead to the sad state we're in now. I don't rely on Microsoft to hand stamp and prepare every piece of software I used on Windows, and I certainly shouldn't have to do the same on my Linux machine. Until we get a method by which I download a file, click on it, and install a program (regardless of which distro I'm running or which version of GTK I'm running), Linux will lag behind. SEVERELY.

I personally like the package management system. I like having one place to look for software for my system, software that I know has been tested with the programs I likely have on my system, software that I know will update with the rest of my system, software I know isn't spyware. It sounds like it wouldn't work too well, but it really works rather well since there are so many programs in the repositories. Even for the programs that don't want/can't be in the repositories, there's ways for people to install those easily as well. There's java programs that install easily regardless of your Linux, there's autopackage, and some developers just put the program and all the files in a zip file that you can extract and then run where ever you want. There are solutions, they probably need better development, but they're not in terrible shape and that's not the most pressing issue for Linux. Much more important is getting the software people really want on Linux (or at least working really well and easy with wine) and making really good oss equivalents to proprietary software (we need something better than gimp to compare to photoshop) and we also need more device drivers, especially wireless. Those are much more important than package management.