OSNews

• RPM: The Redhat package manager. Despite the name, it's used by many Linux distributions and is probably the most popular package manager statistically speaking today. Unfortunately, RPM has many faults, perhaps the most important being that it was never designed for internet based distribution of software for Linux in general. What this means is that it's optimized for transferring large amounts of software to an OS from a CD or Redhat update site. Because of the lack of flexibility in the RPM file format, various distros have tweaked it and so forked the format - if you want to install an RPM you'd better be sure it's designed for your distro. Only the very simplest of packages can be realistically distributed in this way by third parties. To make matters worse RedHat often gratuitously break backwards compatability.
  
• Dependancy hell: Due to the non commercial nature of Linux, packages often have lots of dependancies. These are other packages that must be installed before that package can be installed, we say one depends on the other. All operating systems have dependancies, but Linux software has far more than most. Dependancy hell arises when you want to install a package, but your system doesn't have the required dependancies present. Raw RPM cannot fix this itself - you must manually track down and install those packages. Just pray that there are no sub-dependancies as well!
  
• APT: Advanced Packaging Tools, originally built for Debian and later ported to RPM, apt can automatically resolve dependancies. Installing software with apt is easy, even easier than on Windows - you just type in the name of the software you want, for instance with apt-get install gimp. Unfortunately, apt requires centralised repositories to be maintained for every distro (and often, every subversion), and as such often the software you want is simply not available in the repositories, or it is present, but its dependancies are not. Although Debian has many thousands of packages in its repositories, the manpower required to keep them all up to date means the latest versions of the packages are often only available in Debian some time after they have been released. emerge is a similar idea, but tied to Gentoo.
• RPM Hell: another type of unpleasantness that is caused by the type of package managers in use today on Linux. If the software you want to install isn't available as a package for your distro then all is not lost, you can just compile it from the source (which unless you use a ports based distro a la Gentoo has its own set of problems). Unfortunately, you just entered the twilight zone: RPM (and also the debian system) assume that you use them to install everything on your computer. Because often packages are not available of course this doesn't happen, but then RPM is not aware of the presence of those packages and will refuse to install other packages that depend on them without manual overrides. Hacks around this problem exist (see checkinstall) but they only partially solve the problem

Having witnessed several of my friends try Linux only to give up in disgust after spending several hours attempting to do something as trivial as upgrade Mozilla, I resolved to do something about the problem. So, what issues do we face, and how to other operating systems fix these issues?

The first one is that RPM doesn't posseses enough flexibility to deal with the myriad little differences between distributions. An RPM is basically made up of a list of files and a set of pre and post install scripts. The list of files is always relative to root, so if your distro does not use the exact same filing system layout as the one it was built for, the RPM will not install correctly. Another example of distro differences would be the "install-info" script, which is responsible for integrating TeXinfo manuals into the system: Debian has its own version which is incompatible with the Free Software Foundation version used in most other forms of Linux.

1. "Autopackage, Part I"
2. "Autopackage, Part II"
3. "Autopackage, Part III"