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On Sun, 21 May 2006, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> Apt was released with Debian 2.1 in 1999.
And kicks so much ass over ports that it's not even funny. It's certainly
possible that ports was freaking awesome in 1988 or whenever, but it needs
to take some hints from Apt.
Of course, I think Apt needs to take some hints from Gentoo's emerge system,
too, but I love binary packages (I like supporting a single compile of a
given package), and I love being able to query against the database from
which I'll be installing -- FreeBSD's "portupgrade" tool allows you to
specify to only install binary packages, but the "portversion" tool or
whatever will *always* query against both compiled and source versions, and
since there's always a more recent port, you always get told there's a more
recent version. Bloody smart.
> Red Hat has had Up2date (for corporate use) and Yum and even Apt-get for
> a few years now. Certainly since last June. All of them will let you
> pull down a package and all of its dependencies.
Yum is dog-slow, but it does work. Mostly.
> Both Debian and Red Hat treat the management of installed packages and
> the tracking of available packages as logically separate tasks and built
> separate tools to do the latter, rather than extending rpm or dpkg.
> This still seems to be catching some people out.
I think it's a great idea. There are people who have joined apt to other
packaging systems, like rpm.
> Frankly, the packaging systems for the main Linux distributions are more
> powerful and sophisticated than those of the various decendants of
> 386BSD. This isn't so relevant for FreeBSD or OpenBSD, since they are
> more integrated and centrally managed than any Linux distribution.
> Different story with OSX, though, where the multiplicity of official
> packaging systems (so not counting fink) makes for a real mess IMO. I'm
> used to being able to track the ownership and purpose of any file
> outside /home or /var.
>
> Installing a package by drag-and-drop is a nice feature but there's no
> reason why that could not have been integrated with decent package
> management. That's something that both Gnome and KDE offered back in
> the 90s, ironically.
Totally.
> As long as OS X's customer base is mostly the non-technical and Unix
> geeks who are tired of worrying how their desktop is configured, I don't
> suppose it matters so much. Those who do care can run Debian on their
> powerbooks.
>
Right, because people who just want things to work need crappier tools? No,
it's actually more important that OS X has great packaging. Why is it that
every single OS X tool has to write its own update-checking system?
--
Westheimer's Discovery:
A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
couple of hours in the library.
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
There's stuff above here
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