5 ms·

Your issue isn't with package management which is much, much better than OS X. Try the following three very common tasks on both platforms - list all packages

Your issue isn't with package management which is much, much better than OS X. Try the following three very common tasks on both platforms - list all packages installed, upgrade a package, and determine which package a file belongs to. This is trivial on both the dpkg and rpm based distributions - but I don't believe there is any general way of doing this on OS X. If the App Store takes off, that might change, but right now you are out of luck. Your actual issue is that nobody has either (A) packaged the latest version for you or (B) placed the package in your (likely conservative) repository. You can always install a package without a repository, or, add additional repositories to your system.

epistasis 14y ago
I think the issue here is precisely the concept of package management, as well as the currently used implementations on Linux. Package management is curated by people not involved in the original source packages, and the maintainers of the original open source projects do not do releases into the package management repositories. And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units. Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I sincerely cannot remember the last time I had to use 'rpm'. I can't imagine Debian is any different.
  - epistasis 14y ago
    apt-* and yum are only minorly better than rpm and dpkg, and are still ridiculously over-complicated. The proliferation of extra tools to deal with package management are a testament to the number of people that are unhappy with the current options.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I guess I really don't feel you. 'yum localinstall' is absurdly simple as far as I am concerned, and the standard 'yum install' is obviously even simpler. I am not even aware of any additional arguments localinstall takes. If there are any, I have never used them. Edit: I just checked the manpage, and it seems 'localinstall' is deprecated. Simply using 'install' now does what it used to, though 'localinstall' still works for backwards compatibility. It really could not become any simpler. Complaining that 'rpm' is complicated is like using git without the porcelain then complaining that it is complicated.
pbiggar 14y ago
I disagree that linux is much better than OSX in this regard. Homebrew is really amazing, and while it can't help you configure an entire system, it is pretty compelling. It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't: 1) consistently has the latest versions of your software 2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries). Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I love homebrew - but that isn't OS X. It's a third-party package manager. And is also useless for identifying files you install from the App Store. For better or worse, on Ubuntu, my packages are tracked through dpkg (and, 95% of the time, I just do a sudo apt-get install) - contrawise, on an RHEL system, we've all agreed to track our package with rpm (or sudo yum install). No such universally agreed upon metaphor exists on OS X. They didn't provide a universal package management mechanism. In many cases, you just drag the package into your Applications directory and it's "Installed."
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Right, but I think this is why it's great. Apt has a lot of disadvantages because it's the only option. By contrast, OSX had fink, and macports, and now homebrew. If Fink had been designated the winner back then, there would have been no competition, and homebrew would never have come out.
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      Well - I would have preferred a "good enough" package management system to the "best" system. Also - Fink, too, wasn't OS X - yet another third party system. There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval. The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.

epistasis 14y ago

I think the issue here is precisely the concept of package management, as well as the currently used implementations on Linux. Package management is curated by people not involved in the original source packages, and the maintainers of the original open source projects do not do releases into the package management repositories. And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units. Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.

jlgreco 14y ago
I sincerely cannot remember the last time I had to use 'rpm'. I can't imagine Debian is any different.
- epistasis 14y ago
  apt-* and yum are only minorly better than rpm and dpkg, and are still ridiculously over-complicated. The proliferation of extra tools to deal with package management are a testament to the number of people that are unhappy with the current options.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I guess I really don't feel you. 'yum localinstall' is absurdly simple as far as I am concerned, and the standard 'yum install' is obviously even simpler. I am not even aware of any additional arguments localinstall takes. If there are any, I have never used them. Edit: I just checked the manpage, and it seems 'localinstall' is deprecated. Simply using 'install' now does what it used to, though 'localinstall' still works for backwards compatibility. It really could not become any simpler. Complaining that 'rpm' is complicated is like using git without the porcelain then complaining that it is complicated.

pbiggar 14y ago

I disagree that linux is much better than OSX in this regard. Homebrew is really amazing, and while it can't help you configure an entire system, it is pretty compelling. It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't: 1) consistently has the latest versions of your software 2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries). Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.

ghshephard 14y ago
I love homebrew - but that isn't OS X. It's a third-party package manager. And is also useless for identifying files you install from the App Store. For better or worse, on Ubuntu, my packages are tracked through dpkg (and, 95% of the time, I just do a sudo apt-get install) - contrawise, on an RHEL system, we've all agreed to track our package with rpm (or sudo yum install). No such universally agreed upon metaphor exists on OS X. They didn't provide a universal package management mechanism. In many cases, you just drag the package into your Applications directory and it's "Installed."
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Right, but I think this is why it's great. Apt has a lot of disadvantages because it's the only option. By contrast, OSX had fink, and macports, and now homebrew. If Fink had been designated the winner back then, there would have been no competition, and homebrew would never have come out.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Well - I would have preferred a "good enough" package management system to the "best" system. Also - Fink, too, wasn't OS X - yet another third party system. There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval. The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.