Linked by Rahul on Sat 11th Oct 2008 01:53 UTC
PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
While a nice idea in an ideal world, I don't know how realistic it is?
There are dozens of very different GNU/Linux distributions with very different goals. Some have nothing much in common with other distributions except that they use some, maybe heavily modified Linux kernel as a base. As Linux is free and open, the very heterogenous GNU/Linux OS landscape isn't going to change.
Secondly, I think most people would agree that more important than reaching some ideal state where a same package can be installed regardless of a distro, is to make the system stable and make packages work well without having constant system and aplication crashes and other problems. Debian stable achieves the latter goal admirably, because they control everything that goes into it, from package management to individual packages. On the other hand, there have been some distro experiments that tried to implement support for many package standards simultaneously, usually they haven't been very successful nor stable.
As for OS X or Windows kind of software management in the Linux world, nothing prevents distribution designers from building such a Linux distribution too, with their own kind of software management. But that will be just another Linux distribution, and most other distros aren't likely going to follow suit. For example, the Debian and Ubuntu package management has so many advantages that it is very doubtful whether their users would want those distros to change their package management into something like OS X has.