Yet another package manager

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2004, Collins Richey wrote:
>On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 13:20:31 -0800, Bill Campbell
><linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
>
>> >RPM! Bleh!
>> 
>> When I see a comment like that I get the impression the poster is juvenile
>> and inexperienced (do a google search on ``Johari Window'').
>> 
>
>[ much valuable information about the openpkg system snipped ]
>
>When I see a comment like that, I get the impression (based on many
>bad news encounters) that the RPM tool is juvenile. The openpkg system
>seems like quite an improvement, but RPM as it is normally encountered
>with most every distro is incredibly inept, if not a complete POS, so
>Bleh! is about the kindest description.

I could same the same for Red Hat, but won't because I typically don't make
comments like that without providing some reasons (in the RH case, poor
dependency checking, library inconsistencies, and shall we say horribly
written RPM specfiles that are very difficult to figure out and fix).

Personally I've been working with open source software on a variety of *nix
platforms for over 20 years now, for many years providing the largest
collection of binaries for SCO Xenix and OpenServer systems on the planet.

When I first encountered RPM almost ten years ago it was a bit of a
mystery, and I didn't find much help in the documentation.  After reading a
bit, I found that its philosophy of building from pristine sources under
control of the spec files made the job of managing software and porting
much easier than the ad-hoc methods I had been using.  It also made fixing
broken vendor packages easier as I could start with their packages, make
the fix, then send the appropriate changes back to the vendor.

A major problem though that OpenPKG addresses is how one can make local
customizations without breaking the underlying vendor's package management
system and/or having the distribution's updates breaking our installations
by ``updating'' things I would have preferred to have left alone.  It also
allows me to update things like gcc, perl, and berkeley db, which could
render the underlying system inoperative by changing the shared libraries.

I use the same packages on Linux systems ranging from Caldera eDesktop 2.4
through SuSE 9.2, FreeBSD, and OpenServer.  The files are in the same place
on all our systems, and I don't have to worry about where RH, Caldera,
FreeBSD, etc. put their things.

The vast majority of the packages that we maintain under OpenPKG are server
based, apache and all its modules, php, postfix, amavisd-new, clamav,
postgresql, mysql, etc.  I generally depend on SuSE and Apple for my
desktop applications so don't worry about maintaining these.

Bill
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