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I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of package management last year that you might find interesting. It was very difficult to determine exactl
by seabass-labrax 3y ago
I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of package management last year that you might find interesting. It was very difficult to determine exactly what was the 'first'; as is often the case with big ideas, the Linux community seemed to spontaneously decide that it was needed and came up with multiple solutions in the space of just a few years. Even the question itself is complicated, because software did not typically come with a clear 'release date', which it usually has now.
Ultimately, the conclusion I drew from my research was that Bogus Linux[2] (which is still available, but no longer maintained) was the first distribution with a fully functional, system-wide binary package manager, but that Perl might have a had a functional package manager limited to Perl libraries in development or even in use by some in 1993 too.
[1]: https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd
[2]: https://bogus.org/ https://bogus.org/
- NelsonMinar 3y agoOh fascinating, thanks! Yeah CPAN dates to about 1993. CPAN in turn was based on CTAN (for TeX), which Wikipedia dates to 1991 or 1992. I used both systems in the early/mid 90s and they were not very good. CPAN in particular had a penchant for deciding to rebuilding and reinstall everything, including the Perl interpreter. I assume the general idea is older, going back to at least the 70s and minicomputers or the like.
- oalders 3y agoExcellent look back at the history of CPAN here: https://github.com/neilb/history-of-cpan/blob/master/history.md https://github.com/neilb/history-of-cpan/blob/master/history...
- pabs3 3y agoThe BOGUS Linux FTP server seems to be down, is the distro available anywhere else?
- seabass-labrax 3y agoYou can still get a copy from SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/oldlinuxdistributionarchive/files/bogus/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/oldlinuxdistributionarchive...