Star KpackageKit: Future of Package Managers on Your Desktop
Linked by Rahul on Sat 11th Oct 2008 01:53 UTC
Linux PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.
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RE: so...
by WorknMan on Sat 11th Oct 2008 03:32 UTC in reply to "so..."
WorknMan
Member since:
2005-11-13

while commendable, i dont think this fixes the real issue, that of being able to put one file/link up on some webpage and expect it to install across distros.

Exactly. Just like I can have an ODF file on my computer and open it with any word processor that supports the open document standard, so to is needed a package format that is standardized to the point where you could download a single package and use it across multiple distros and package managers.
I don't know why people are opposed to this idea. On one hand, whenever there's a major release of some big package, I see comments on here from people asking why there's no packages available for distro x yet. But on the other hand, many of these same people will claim that different distros reinventing the wheel/duplicating work by creating the same packages is not a problem.

Looks like they've gone from the idea of trying to create a package manager that works across all distros to an abstraction layer. Well, at least they're getting warmer ;)

Edited 2008-10-11 03:33 UTC

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