Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jun 2008 16:51 UTC, submitted by sjvn
Installing software on Linux. In the world of online minefields, this is the big one. Back in the day, you installed software on Linux by compiling it manually. Time-consuming, but assuming you had a decent knowledge of gcc, make, and maintaining library files, this could actually work. Later one came the package management systems that were supposed to make installing software on Linux a breeze: rpm, dpkg, and so on, and so forth. Since human beings have the innate tendency to assume that everyone else is wrong and only they are right, we are now stuck with 3453495 different Linux package managers. Denis Washington, a Fedora developer, is taking steps to resolve this issue.
Thread beginning with comment 319736
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-11-17
The point is that MSI is just another way to install software, be it a layer on top of the package manager, this is what packagekit or CNR are.
It may seem like a good idea at first: let's unify all package managers under one API that everybody can use. This is not such a good idea actually, because you just create another library that need to be installed everywhere to replace everything, but actually only SOME people will use it, but never all and your API will only add to the confusion. What you need is not create another API, but to collaborate with those that already exist. rpm is fine as such, MSI is fine as such and dpkg is fine as such. The problem is that they all exist separately.
The confusion is not MSI, the confusion is that you have one way to package software on Windows, one way to package software on Mandriva and one way to package software on Debian, but a package created with MSI won't work if you don't have the libraries installed, a package created for rpm won't work if rpm is not installed and a deb package won't work without dpkg.
By default, Mandriva doesn't have MSI nor dpkg, Windows doesn't have rpm nor dpkg and debian doesn't have MSI. Fortunately, there is alien to convert packages between rpm and deb and wine to use MSI on Debian and Mandriva and this is the way to go: instead on adding just another layer on top of the package manager (so called package installer) which just adds to the confusion, we need to reduce the number of package managers and make bridges between them.
In other words, creating something like MSI but not MSI on Mandriva or Debian or Suse does just mean that the software that use the MSI-like API will only install where the MSI-like API is available, that is to say nowhere or maybe one or two distros. On the other hand, rpm, dpkg and MSI are already available on many machines. Porting rpm to windows would be a way better idea. Already too much package managers and confusion.