Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 4th Jun 2007 16:38 UTC, submitted by anonymous
"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller
packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable,
and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide
concrete benefits to end users."
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Member since:
2007-06-04
Hi Dean. :-) We address this on the forum posts over at Freespire related to the Linspire Letter that was sent out. In particular, my comment at:
http://forum.freespire.org/showthread.php?p=62301#post62301
The study was done on Linspire's distribution (warehouse). The distribution obviously does make a difference to what specific issues you'll see using APT, but I guarantee you no current distribution can protect you from APT's problems with dependency resolution...the problem of removals and failure to install can't be resolved with distribution-side QA checks because it's heavily dependent on the user's machine configuration. Furthermore, we offer optimization of the solution: we can find you the newest packages, the smallest packages, the highest rated packages, the most stable packages, whatever you can come up with to assign value to packages. This alone, even without the completeness and optimal removal guarantees, is a significant improvement on APTs heuristic approach.
So many distros go for an APT basis because APT is a whole lot better than a lot of the other options. Just because something is better than the other options doesn't mean we should decide against improving it for the future though: that's the anti-innovation mindset that OSS tries so hard to rebel against.