apt dpkg, ips, spkg, conary, IT IS INCREDIBLE THE LIBERTY OPEN SOURCE HAS CREATED
battle between conary and ips: http://tinyurl.com/6yyyoc
battle between spkg and ips: http://tinyurl.com/5wwdah
And there is more out there.
What is intriguing is that the spkg guy works for sun and helped create opensolaris but also maintains his own distro, the nexenta guys created the first opensolaris distro with a modern packaging system and other innovations like booting off zfs, and and conary guy has worked for free on opensolaris since the beginning, one of the only people like that left.
So all of these packaging battles are just a microcosm of a greater war, a war of ideologies and development methods and entire distributions. Truly a magnificent web of free creation caused by opensolaris being made open source.
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Pkg-src would be a well-tested (Netbsd, Dragonfly, others), secure, platform independent package management system with lots of features. To me it seems like it could suit heavy duty server systems like Solaris quite well. I wonder why OpenSolaris crew hasn't considered it? They wouldn't even have to reinvent anything, the pkg-src infrastructure is already ready.
War..? Nah.. I think OpenSolaris guys are just - maybe sometimes desperately - trying to get their act together again, find the best way forward, before fast growing Linux and even BSDs (and others) will eat their bread.
Sun Solaris is still a very strong brand anyway. Although people like most OSnews users (who probably mostly use desktop systems only and probably do not manage heavy big networks and systems) may perhaps sometimes see Solaris as a thing of the past already, actually Solaris is still very much and widely used in big organizations like universities. It has been well tested over the years and simply works and does its job well.
they actually considered every option before they decided to reinvent that wheel. There is a lot of chat by s. hahn about the decision on the mailing lists and his blog ( http://blogs.sun.com/sch/?page=1 )





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