Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

What's the best package management system?

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creedon:
Alien DOES work, but it's sporatic; sometimes it installs an app with no problem, other times it's nothing but a headache; usually dependancies will put the turd in the punchbowl.
I really don't see the problem; Debian has almost 8,000 official packages, and there's probably three times that many unofficial packages in .deb format available on the internet.  Just because a package is listed as "unofficial" doesn't mean there's trouble with it, it may be something that the Debian developers feel might not be quite right a far as free vs. non-free goes; they're very anal about that.  The app may work perfectly, but it doesn't meet Debians standards for "free" software.

Calum:
yeah but there's bound to be a raft of stuff that i can only get via rpms, and what i want to know (in this example) is, will they install on debian? i've noticed a lot of rpms have problems installing in mandrake purely due to the slightly different directory structure between red hat and mandrake, so is this intensified when using less red-hat-like distros? for instance i will want to install FirstClass from here or here. This program is available only as an rpm and that is for red hat and mandrake. Can this be installed under debian? or slackware? or gentoo? or whatever? and so on.

Master of Reality:
i dont have enough time to read all that writing above. So i will just reply to the first post.

Slackware can use tgz packages and rpm packages. The rpm utility isnt very reliable tho. Thats why slackware also comes with rpm2tgz which seems to work. I found the tgz packages to be faster installing than rpm. The only thing i thing i know that i like for debian is the apt-get. Slackware ncurses based pkgtool is really cool too.

beltorak0:
I think I've said this here before, but after a few necessary RPM packages that could not be installed because of dependency hell, I stick to compiling sources.  I have, however, had few problems using the "--nodeps" flag for RPMs.  But if you go this route, don't install the latest package with slackware; unless you like hunting down lots of files to delete them and try again. One of the "missing dependencies" was Bash, which of course I was using  to type "rpm"!!!  whatever.

I have found so very few slack-packs on the net.  Even those with a ".tgz" were sources.  The slackware install ".tgz"'s don't check for dependancies, this gives you a great ammount of latitude for making a custom install (whereby you might have a few more-up-to-date libs in the form of RPM's installed), but it is a pain in the ass if you need the ensure that you have all the necessary dependancies to run software package $drop-name-in-here.  It will install, but it just won't run.

If you have a relatively fast computer (i have a 750MHz Duron) compiling takes little time.  The really big projects (open office for instance) come with thier own extractor.  RPM's are by far the most often binary packages I have found.  Especially when using the "rpm find" website   ;)  .  They keep a lot of packages in rpm form.

If i am not mistaken, gentoo is entirely source based, isn't it?  I know it's an LFS, but thats about all I know.  I hear that not fully reading the documentation is a quick (slow?) way to waste a lot of time.

The only problem I have with installing from source is the lack of tracking if you want to uninstall it.  "make uninstall" isn't always coded for in the make file, and names like "libgosflr.so.6.0.2" give little in the way of describing what the hell it is for.

I'm rambling.  I'll stop now.  What I mean to say is that RH RPM's are probably the most available binary packages, and that means that you might be better off with redhat.

-t.

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: beltorak0 ]

Master of Reality:
.tgz doesnt check dependencies?? I have yet for one tgz package to not work. It also is faster on slackware 8.1 installing squid on the same computer as installing squid from rpm (200MHz 80Mb RAM).
try www.linuxpackages.net for slackware packages. I have found almost every package i need from there.

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