Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jun 2008 16:51 UTC, submitted by sjvn
Installing software on Linux. In the world of online minefields, this is the big one. Back in the day, you installed software on Linux by compiling it manually. Time-consuming, but assuming you had a decent knowledge of gcc, make, and maintaining library files, this could actually work. Later one came the package management systems that were supposed to make installing software on Linux a breeze: rpm, dpkg, and so on, and so forth. Since human beings have the innate tendency to assume that everyone else is wrong and only they are right, we are now stuck with 3453495 different Linux package managers. Denis Washington, a Fedora developer, is taking steps to resolve this issue.
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Member since:
2007-08-22
In the form of Autopackage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopackage
http://www.autopackage.org/
There's also others (see the other posts); but it's still the same kind of thing that is needed. (Autopackage is really only complicated by the fact that it tries to mitigate the LibC API too.)
Seriously. The distributors need to realize that commercial software (freeware, shareware, companies, etc.) want control of how they package software, and there needs to be something that mitigates this.
Under Windows you have MSI - which InstallShield, Wise Installer, and everything else work with. And really that is the same kind of thing that the F/OSS world needs to. If a distro wants to use RPM, DPKG, PKG, or e-builds - fine.
Of course, this all boils down to the question of: Who is going to generate the package? And F/OSS developer's don't seem to want to do so for their own stuff - while everyone else wants to. So we need a method for both.
It'll make life a lot easier for companies too.