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

There is a unified package format

[ajs318]

There is a unified package format, and that is the source code tarball.

People need to be disabused of the notion that there is anything bad about compiling on your own machine. Gentoo and FreeBSD prove that is not the case.

Re:The solution!

[ichimunki]

The idea of the post you're replying to was to package dependencies inside the application. That way, you can indeed install 16 applications each having a dependency on 16 different versions of the same library, with no problems whatsoever.

In your example... every application for Mac OS X is entirely statically compiled? They don't even link to system libraries that one can reasonably assume an Mac OS X install has?