Yet another package manager

[David Bandel]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 06:47:58 -0500, Matthew Carpenter <matt at eisgr.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Problem is, whether it's the rims or the rubber, the wheels we're
> running on ain't that great.  I have yet to really poke into APT yet
> (the rims, or package management infrastructure) but even it seems to
> have its difficulties in that the sources tend to be HTTP repositories.
> ~  (does APT support FTP as well?)  I've been using Aptitude as a front

yes.  in fact, that's the original.  http support was added later
(many years ago, but still after the initial implementation)

> end to APT-GET.  Problem is that we are behind a kludgey transparent
> WebSense implementation which often breaks HTTP traffic (at least when
> it wants you to authenticate).  I'm also a bit lost on Broken packages,
> and it's not necessarily intuitive what or how things are managed.
> Granted, I've just mentioned a "transport" problem and a "interface"
> problem, arguably not even the fault of the system itself, but things
> that can turn people off nonetheless.
> 
> Perhaps these guys have never tried APT or worse, went with their first
> impression, are sick of RPM's and the infrastructure which hinders them
> (or lack thereof), or some other combination of APT/DEB/RPM
> disgruntlement...  I can't read the story right  now (off line) but
> IIRC, these are the guys who are trying to manage DEB's, RPM's, tgz, etc
> from an intuitive interface???

well, some interfaces can deal with all of them, or alien can
translate from one to the other. After all, a binary package can be
opened and repackaged easily enough.  RPMs don't boil down to much
more than gzip'd cpio packages.

> 
> Before you get upset about "someone reinventing the wheel", remember one
> of the best tenets of Open Source: Choice.
> If nobody ever reinvented the wheel we would not have the choices.  I
> realize that it makes it easier to make choices when there are a limited
> number, but 1) there is always a limited number of choices and 2) their
> way may be better!  On an off chute, I was rather intrigued that MEPIS
> uses Kpackage.  Wow!  Talk about a return to COL days.  :)

Nothing wrong with another paciage manager, especially if it does
something better (particularly dependency management).  I moved away
from RPM because I didn't need the headaches RPM depencies were giving
me.

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
            - Nemesis Air Racing Team motto