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From a historical perspective... Debian and Redhat brought package management to Linux 30 years ago. That's why so many other distros were built on top of them.
by seethishat 2mo ago
From a historical perspective... Debian and Redhat brought package management to Linux 30 years ago. That's why so many other distros were built on top of them.
And now today, we have a lot of new packages mangers on top of that, which has increased complexity a lot.
If I wanted to publish tools/programs, I would distribute the source code and let each distro decide how/if they want to package it. I would not try to do this myself. It's not a reasonable thing to do.
- __d 2mo agoHistorically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform packaging and easy installation. This wasn’t entirely new: commercial Unix had packaging mechanisms, but lacked the motivation for gratis distribution. Prior to Linux, autotools was a standardization that made installation easy across the many commercial Unix variants. That’s now moved on. There are dozens of packaging and distribution formats, none of which is universally applicable (as the OP says). And users’ expectations have moved well beyond the autotools invocation. It’d be great for both end users and application developers for a universal solution to emerge, but there’s no sign of it happening.