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:
2006-02-05
How is MSI stupid? On the windows platform you can script any installer for any package, and deploy it across any number of machines, customized according to group policy.
2: self-contained directory containing everything.
this is really easy, with type number 1, the user and/or distribution can simply install/package however the f*** they please. with type 2, if the provider is a moron and makes crappily closed crapware, the distribution can still just repackage if they please, or if the user has a distribution which doesent prefer to package this application, just download the damned tarball, extract it, and RUN the software.. no crappy msi, no weird third party installers doing weird weird stuff, just run..
Deploying to a home desktop and across a big network and wildly different things, and aren't really comparable.
To create more advanced package management tools, you need a standard format to work against. The lack of a standard format means the inability to build robust tools for large scale deployments.
There are distro specific tools that are up to the task, but that means you are stuck with the package selection the distro provides you (or take on the burden of packaging yourself). It would be a far better solution if the project itself could take care of packaging (since they know more then anyone else what is supposed to be going on), and have that seamlessly integrate into whatever package manager a distro happens to be using.
Edited 2008-06-23 20:20 UTC