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The Linux community needed this around 15 years ago when Windows 98 came out. Now we've got .deb and .rpm which do the job perfectly well. It's even better nowa

The Linux community needed this around 15 years ago when Windows 98 came out. Now we've got .deb and .rpm which do the job perfectly well. It's even better nowadays, as well, since their existence is effectively hidden from the user thanks to package managers. Too little, way too late.

rokgarbas 14y ago
you can rollback on debian? you can install packages as user on RedHat? i moved away from it just because things like .deb and .rpm don't do the job all the way
- rocky1138 14y ago
  "do the job perfectly well" is a bad way of saying what I was thinking: "for the most part, they work pretty well for the average user" which is true. They don't cover all edge cases perfectly. But for a user who is new to Linux and wants to install some software, it's better than what we've got on any other OS except ones with dedicated and closed app stores.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
I don't think package management is a solved problem. Most distributions fail at the simple task of installing multiple versions of the same package alongside each other. Also, lackluster dependency management (you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z). There are many approaches that one would mistake as being "reinventing the wheel": 1. FreeBSD ports system is barebones, but incredibly simple and transparent. 2. Arch Linux's PKGBUILD recipes are also simple and, at times, a much better alternative to binary packages. 3. Gobo Linux (http://www.gobolinux.org http://www.gobolinux.org) solved binary packaging the right way by having each package in it's own tree. It's approach is similar to OS X, which also gets this right.
- antidoh 14y ago
  "you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z)" Almost exactly what happened when I installed nmh. Wasn't at all obvious from the dependency list that I'd get qmail, didn't pay attention to the warning prompt and said Y, ... Bonus, I have a bunch of new system accounts in my Display Manager's login screen. Bleah. Fortunately my scorched-earth reinstall is coming up, so I just leave them there to make it easier to hate what happened.
j-kidd 14y ago
Ironically, this Guix thing would be perfect... for Windows. Right now, I have to maintain my own list of GnuWin32 installers (wget coreutils cygutils diffutils findutils grep gzip less patch sed tar unzip) retrieved from sf.net, with a 30 lines batch script to deploy them, plus a powershell command to retrieve wget as the first step.
- rokgarbas 14y ago
  nix (and potentially guix) is working on windows, at least from what i heard. probably there are some issues with existing packages since nobody really pays much attention to windows but if somebody cared this could improved a lot.

rokgarbas 14y ago

you can rollback on debian? you can install packages as user on RedHat? i moved away from it just because things like .deb and .rpm don't do the job all the way

rocky1138 14y ago
"do the job perfectly well" is a bad way of saying what I was thinking: "for the most part, they work pretty well for the average user" which is true. They don't cover all edge cases perfectly. But for a user who is new to Linux and wants to install some software, it's better than what we've got on any other OS except ones with dedicated and closed app stores.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

I don't think package management is a solved problem. Most distributions fail at the simple task of installing multiple versions of the same package alongside each other. Also, lackluster dependency management (you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z). There are many approaches that one would mistake as being "reinventing the wheel": 1. FreeBSD ports system is barebones, but incredibly simple and transparent. 2. Arch Linux's PKGBUILD recipes are also simple and, at times, a much better alternative to binary packages. 3. Gobo Linux (http://www.gobolinux.org http://www.gobolinux.org) solved binary packaging the right way by having each package in it's own tree. It's approach is similar to OS X, which also gets this right.

antidoh 14y ago
"you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z)" Almost exactly what happened when I installed nmh. Wasn't at all obvious from the dependency list that I'd get qmail, didn't pay attention to the warning prompt and said Y, ... Bonus, I have a bunch of new system accounts in my Display Manager's login screen. Bleah. Fortunately my scorched-earth reinstall is coming up, so I just leave them there to make it easier to hate what happened.

j-kidd 14y ago

Ironically, this Guix thing would be perfect... for Windows. Right now, I have to maintain my own list of GnuWin32 installers (wget coreutils cygutils diffutils findutils grep gzip less patch sed tar unzip) retrieved from sf.net, with a 30 lines batch script to deploy them, plus a powershell command to retrieve wget as the first step.

rokgarbas 14y ago
nix (and potentially guix) is working on windows, at least from what i heard. probably there are some issues with existing packages since nobody really pays much attention to windows but if somebody cared this could improved a lot.