14 months ago, the Autopackage project was small and active, and members sounded optimistic about its success. Now, although the alternative installer project continues, progress has almost come to a halt. The #autopackage channel on irc.oftc.net sits vacant most days, the developer blogs cover almost anything except the project, and commits to the source code repository have become rare. Formally, the project is still alive, but the major contributors all agree that it is faltering. So what happened?
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Member since:2005-07-02
The problem is that autopackage was not installed by default and was not endorsed by the distros -- for one reason or another.
That's the sad truth. It's a very good system, which was promising system. But there's truth in the fact that it was partly a solution in search of a problem. Sure, there are annoyances with package managers, but the fact is that the package system works, mostly. Recent efforts, such as friendly front-ends (such as Ubuntu's Add/Remove Program app, or soon from CNR) have started to really address these issues. It doesn't hurt that Ubuntu, being more and more popular, is starting to be a more attractive distro to package for among ISVs.
Member since:2006-09-08
the only problem is with package managers that freeze every six months, like Ubuntu. If I want to use the latest Firefox or OpenOffice, autopackage was perfect for that and I'm sad that it's languishing.
DEBs and RPMs are great for core functionality IMO, but not for independent software vendors or updated versions that haven't made their way to backports yet (or never will, as Firefox 2 in Ubuntu showed)
Autopackage was also good because you didn't need to make a deb, rpm, or whatever for every single distro, therefore less duplication of efforts. I remember when Ubuntu was still in its infancy, some packages from Debian wouldn't work on it, yet the .packages of autopackage would, thankfully. But for smaller distros, autopackage was good for them too.
1.2 was supposed to including updating apps too..
Edited 2007-02-13 02:27
Member since:
2005-06-28
The problem is that autopackage was not installed by default and was not endorsed by the distros -- for one reason or another.