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Well, package management often starts too simple. Sadly, most people who build new ones seem to ignore the lessons from earlier projects. In my opinion, Paludis

by JepZ 8y ago

Well, package management often starts too simple. Sadly, most people who build new ones seem to ignore the lessons from earlier projects. In my opinion, Paludis/Cave [1] is a decent example of which cases have to be handled, but as it uses the ebuild/exheres system it is slow as hell. The user experience isn't that good either, but at least they know how to do proper dependency management (e.g. keeping the system as stable as possible during updates by using a reasonable order). For anybody who wants to build a package manager I highly recommend to take a look at what Paludis does (not necessarily how they do it). [1]: https://paludis.exherbo.org https://paludis.exherbo.org

filmor 8y ago
I didn't use cave, but I remember using Paludis instead of Portage on Gentoo about 15 years ago, and it was really really fast at the actual package management tasks. The builds themselves take time of course, and especially for smaller packages the "./configure" part is infuriating, but that's nothing a package manager can fix.
- JepZ 8y ago
  In comparison to Portage it is fast, but I wouldn't consider Portage a benchmark ;-) and if you compare Paludis with Apt/Yum/Pacman and the likes it is still very slow (e.g. comparing installing binary packages). The comparison isn't completely fair, as Paludis has a much better dependency resolution algorithm (in terms of quality), but I think the main difference comes from the package format. Ebuilds/exheres are Bash scripts which need to be evaluated in order to obtain basic information like for example build- or run-time dependencies. So to find out which packages should be updated, Paludis has to evaluate a few thousand bash scripts while other package formats allow much quicker algorithms. Cave is just a newer front-end for Paludis which improves the user experience a bit, but the Performance should be pretty much the same.
digi_owl 8y ago
> Sadly, most people who build new ones seem to ignore the lessons from earlier projects. This applies to FOSS in general, and then some...

by JepZ 8y ago

filmor 8y ago

I didn't use cave, but I remember using Paludis instead of Portage on Gentoo about 15 years ago, and it was really really fast at the actual package management tasks. The builds themselves take time of course, and especially for smaller packages the "./configure" part is infuriating, but that's nothing a package manager can fix.

JepZ 8y ago
In comparison to Portage it is fast, but I wouldn't consider Portage a benchmark ;-) and if you compare Paludis with Apt/Yum/Pacman and the likes it is still very slow (e.g. comparing installing binary packages). The comparison isn't completely fair, as Paludis has a much better dependency resolution algorithm (in terms of quality), but I think the main difference comes from the package format. Ebuilds/exheres are Bash scripts which need to be evaluated in order to obtain basic information like for example build- or run-time dependencies. So to find out which packages should be updated, Paludis has to evaluate a few thousand bash scripts while other package formats allow much quicker algorithms. Cave is just a newer front-end for Paludis which improves the user experience a bit, but the Performance should be pretty much the same.

digi_owl 8y ago

> Sadly, most people who build new ones seem to ignore the lessons from earlier projects. This applies to FOSS in general, and then some...