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
MSI itself is not really a package manager by any means. Rather, it is an API that software can use to tell the system that it is installed, where, and how to uninstall. It is certainly a key component to a package manager. MSI does provide a "package format", but you need not use that format to use the MSI API; though most do. MSI has certainly brought Windows closer to providing a package manager - that is certain - as nearly every installer program for Windows has switched to using it.
However, even some Microsoft tools still do not use MSI as the primary source of their installer (so far as I can tell) and use a mix of MSI packages and non-MSI packages; yet the whole thing is registered through MSI with Windows as being installed.
The difference between MSI and a package manager is that MSI is focused on how one piece of software installs into the system. There is nothing in it for dependencies or anything else of that nature. There is no repository being MSI from which to grab all kinds of stuff. And perhaps that is what you are thinking can be done with RPM/DEB/etc and not MSI - but that is exactly the case because MSI is not a package manager; it is a package installer, nothing more - and the two are quite different.
Perhaps that's why you're so confused - and think there is so much confusion - with respect to Windows.
Also - you don't see the RPM/DEB/etc guys porting their stuff to Windows either. You do see F/OSS software ported to Windows, and then the projects usually end up providing a nice MSI installer for it, which works very well.