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RPM is antiquated. New package managers like apk & pacman have had great success due to their simplicity and attracting a lot of maintainers that are able to ma

RPM is antiquated. New package managers like apk & pacman have had great success due to their simplicity and attracting a lot of maintainers that are able to maintain more stable packages than other distros.

pxc 4y ago
This is totally false, and compares package managers in incomparable categories (pacman's counterparts in the RPM-based package management world are Zypper and dnf, not rpm). Arch Linux itself has very few packages— ~10k, around half of what you find Fedora, an RPM-based distro. The DEB packaging format and tools related to it are way more convoluted, and still Debian has several times as many packages as Arch and many, many more maintainers than Arch does. The only area where the Arch community sees more contributors for packages is the AUR, where contributors are decidedly not maintainers, package quality is low, and packages are not stable. (And users face this in addition to the whole basic integration problem with source-based packages and packages installed via binary repos, of which only the latter is ever considered by pacman's dep solver during upgrades.) Users like pacman because it's fast. It's not nearly robust enough for use at serious scale. Cutting corners is how it gets that speed. Alpine's apk is just another lightweight cousin of dpkg that incorporates some higher-level dependency resolution in a barebones way, like ipkg and opkg, like are used on embedded systems or OpenWRT or whatever. It's not some maintainer magnet which has multiplied the (pretty tiny) Alpine repos (which don't even include, for example, a JVM).
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  False.. Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more stable packages (meaning up-to-date) than other DEB and RPM-based distros. Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Also, Alpine certainly does have a JVM so that statement is flat out false and now sure where you're getting your misinformation from.
  - pxc 4y ago
    You're right, I misremembered some detail about Java packaging on Alpine. There's an Alpine-based Docker image I've set up to build for a Java application at work where I have to manually pull down some binary that I expected to be packaged, but I don't recall all of the details. As for the substance of your reply: > Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Yes, this is what I said. Zypper and dnf are high level package management tools comparable to Pacman. RPM is not. > stable packages (meaning up-to-date) That's not at all what the word 'stable' means, but > Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more [up to date packages] than other DEB and RPM-based distros This is also false. Look at the numbers: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest Debian Unstable has > 18k up-to-date packages. Fedora Rawhide has > 14k. openSUSE Tumbleweed has > 9k. Arch has fewer than 9k up-to-date packages. Arch has fewer up-to-date packages than any of the most prominent RPM-based or DEB-based rolling release distros. It does have a larger percentage of its (relatively very small) total package collection at the latest versions from upstream: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest On that front, the difference between Arch and Alpine is greater than, e.g., the difference between Alpine and openSUSE. Debian Unstable about matches up with the AUR on that metric. Not to mention that Nixpkgs, whose tooling is pretty much the polar opposite of Pacman's KISS philosophy, has more packages than Arch and the AUR combined and has more packages which are up-to-date than both combined. I am sure that the simplicity of the PKGBUILD format has been important in the personal journeys of many package maintainers for Arch Linux. But the notion that this means that Arch has attracted so many maintainers that is capable of keeping a greater number of packages up-to-date is absolutely unsupported by the facts. The further claim that this (fictional) superiority reflects fundamental technical virtues in its package management system that make it a better base for enterprise Linux distros than something like Fedora or Debian or openSUSE is a huge leap and a non-sequitur.

pxc 4y ago

This is totally false, and compares package managers in incomparable categories (pacman's counterparts in the RPM-based package management world are Zypper and dnf, not rpm). Arch Linux itself has very few packages— ~10k, around half of what you find Fedora, an RPM-based distro. The DEB packaging format and tools related to it are way more convoluted, and still Debian has several times as many packages as Arch and many, many more maintainers than Arch does. The only area where the Arch community sees more contributors for packages is the AUR, where contributors are decidedly not maintainers, package quality is low, and packages are not stable. (And users face this in addition to the whole basic integration problem with source-based packages and packages installed via binary repos, of which only the latter is ever considered by pacman's dep solver during upgrades.) Users like pacman because it's fast. It's not nearly robust enough for use at serious scale. Cutting corners is how it gets that speed. Alpine's apk is just another lightweight cousin of dpkg that incorporates some higher-level dependency resolution in a barebones way, like ipkg and opkg, like are used on embedded systems or OpenWRT or whatever. It's not some maintainer magnet which has multiplied the (pretty tiny) Alpine repos (which don't even include, for example, a JVM).

encryptluks2 4y ago
False.. Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more stable packages (meaning up-to-date) than other DEB and RPM-based distros. Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Also, Alpine certainly does have a JVM so that statement is flat out false and now sure where you're getting your misinformation from.
- pxc 4y ago
  You're right, I misremembered some detail about Java packaging on Alpine. There's an Alpine-based Docker image I've set up to build for a Java application at work where I have to manually pull down some binary that I expected to be packaged, but I don't recall all of the details. As for the substance of your reply: > Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Yes, this is what I said. Zypper and dnf are high level package management tools comparable to Pacman. RPM is not. > stable packages (meaning up-to-date) That's not at all what the word 'stable' means, but > Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more [up to date packages] than other DEB and RPM-based distros This is also false. Look at the numbers: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest Debian Unstable has > 18k up-to-date packages. Fedora Rawhide has > 14k. openSUSE Tumbleweed has > 9k. Arch has fewer than 9k up-to-date packages. Arch has fewer up-to-date packages than any of the most prominent RPM-based or DEB-based rolling release distros. It does have a larger percentage of its (relatively very small) total package collection at the latest versions from upstream: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest On that front, the difference between Arch and Alpine is greater than, e.g., the difference between Alpine and openSUSE. Debian Unstable about matches up with the AUR on that metric. Not to mention that Nixpkgs, whose tooling is pretty much the polar opposite of Pacman's KISS philosophy, has more packages than Arch and the AUR combined and has more packages which are up-to-date than both combined. I am sure that the simplicity of the PKGBUILD format has been important in the personal journeys of many package maintainers for Arch Linux. But the notion that this means that Arch has attracted so many maintainers that is capable of keeping a greater number of packages up-to-date is absolutely unsupported by the facts. The further claim that this (fictional) superiority reflects fundamental technical virtues in its package management system that make it a better base for enterprise Linux distros than something like Fedora or Debian or openSUSE is a huge leap and a non-sequitur.