In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Definitely a nod for Conary, thanks for bringing that up. Simply put, Conary is like a hybrid revision control system and packaging system. Very promising, because it does what the other distributed packaging systems don't: it actually attempts to make the upstream developer's and packager's jobs easier instead of focusing solely on the end user.
Less so for Launchpad... While it's great that Canonical wants to help OSS projects coordinate and work together, this does not seem like an appropriate opportunity for Canonical to go proprietary. This is not a matter of "proprietary == bad." If Canonical came out with a proprietary remote system administration console, for example, that would be great for the Linux community. But a collaboration tool targeted at free software projects? They had to know this was not going to be acceptable for many projects.
If you want to try and lock-in your corporate customers, go right ahead. If you want to sell premium add-ons to end users, I have no problem with that. But please don't insult the development community by peddling proprietary development tools. That is sooo not in the spirit of free software.
Member since:
2005-10-31
While I agree that the centralized approach is better, I think somehow encouraging original developers to make applications available in one of those packaging systems can help streamline the packaging and delivery of new versions in repositories to users. Which is one of the points I think he was trying to make. I don't know how familiar the author is with Conary/rPath[1] but I seem to recall it functions based around a similar concept.
While I don't think it needs to be the case that distros abandon their current packaging systems, for things like backwards compatibility, wider ISV adoption and maybe even the reclamation of effort packagers, it would be a good thing for them to look into adapting their processes along these lines. Maybe modifying build tools to import those universal formats.
The idea of making cross distro collaboration easier is not new. Various[2] other[3] efforts[4] seem to attempt addressing interoperability amongst distros without having to give up individuality and focus. I think it is critical at this point to help continue to foster growth and development especially in areas such as polish and refinement.
[1] http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary
[2] https://launchpad.net/distros
[3] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Home
[4] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
Edited 2007-01-16 04:53