Come in and vote for your favorite front-end of package management solutions (Javascript req). Update: The “Other” option was removed and all its votes deleted, as the last hour it got hammered by script kiddies and went from 5% to 39% unaturally fast. The poll is now closed.
Poll: Vote for your Favorite Package Management Front-End
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What about Synaptic Package Manager? Its the best I have used, esp with its smart update feature and easy interface
tgz with a install script.
I also agree that Yast2 should be listed. Suse is one of the most popular commercial distros out there. It is a front-end for RPM…speaking of which…why is RPM even listed? It’s not a front-end for anything. It IS, by all definitions, a package management system. What the hell?
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
doesn’t get any easier than that. or if you need a GUI, synaptic.
In my opinion, package managers are not always necessary, and some users might have more use for them than other users simply because of the way that programs tend to be installed on the operating system they choose to use.
The way most applications/utilities are obtained and installed on my OS/2 system is as follows:
* Download a ZIP file containing the app/utility.
* Create a directory on my application drive for the new application/utility, usually something along the lines of X:os2stuffprogname or X:dosstuffprogname.
* UNZIP the new software into the directory.
* If required, update PATH or LIBPATH to reference the new directory.
* Manually create new WPS program object or 4OS2 alias to run the new program.
It’s a simple methodology, but it has worked very well for me for the past 12 years (in OS/2) and 16 years (in DOS).
Under Linux (or other Unix-like OSes) which tend to distribute each program’s files to various widely scattered directories, and where statically-linked packages are somewhat less common, a package manager might make more sense.
I tend to use RPM at the moment on such systems only because that tends to be the main package manager on the distros I’m currently using.
There’s a tool called find_leaves on Mandrake which does that, but you’re right, urpme doesn’t do it automatically.
Wouldn’t it be just dandy if all linux distros used just one package manager?
Foront-end? Where is Synaptic. While Apt and Yum may be front ends to RPM, that’s quite a stretch of the imagination.
I vote for Apt and Synaptic.
It wouldn’t really make much of a difference, no. You can use apt on anything .deb or .rpm based already. Doesn’t make them any more ‘compatible’.
I chose ports because I’ve long been a BSD user, and now that I use OS X, I’ve taken a liking to Darwin Ports. It’s a nice feature to be able to “activate” and “deactivate” a package, which basically creates or removes hard links from the software database directory into the install directory. This keeps the system from needing to create and keep track of a list of all files included by the package. To deinstall, you just deactivate, then remove the directory that contains that package. The only disadvantage is that, because the system uses hard links, you have to have the install dir on the same disk volume as the database directory.
What about portupgrade!! It’s the best, seriously!
Replying to myself here…
Actually, you wouldn’t normally just delete the directory to uninstall a package, you would use “port uninstall” to do it for you so that it would update the database to show that the package was no longer installed.
Nothing beats apt-get on debian.