On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> wrote: > But after 20 years, the package manager idea certain has revealed many > shortcomings (in short, it sucks in many ways). Package managers work > great for setting up the core distro, and also if the packages you need > are in the repos. Distros like RHEL and Debian tend to have long-term > stability at the expense of not having recent versions of programs and > libraries. >
AIUI, your main beef with the packaging system is, as you rightly note, an inherent conflict between stability and currency. Very true. RHEL especially, Debian to a somewhat lesser extent, and every OS that has a curated package system, will run into that problem. But the solution isn't necessarily to throw out the packaging system. All you need is to expand it. I don't know how you do it with yum, but with apt, you simply add something to /etc/apt/sources.list (or the .d directory), grab your index files, and install. That's how I install PostgreSQL on Debian Wheezy; the Debian repos ship Postgres 9.1, but by simply adding the apt.postgresql.org repo, I can grab 9.4 using the exact same system. Ubuntu's PPA system achieves the same thing, as mentioned, but even without PPAs, you can still have multiple repositories. The hardest part is managing library versions, and that's always going to be a problem. Sometimes the latest version of an application demands a newer version of a library than you have, and if you upgrade that library, you might need to upgrade a whole lot else, too, so you may as well upgrade everything and call it a new version of the distro. The versioning problem is just as much an issue no matter how you try to cope with it. Package managers can't magically solve everything, but they can make a lot of jobs easier, so on that basis, I say they're beneficial. We don't need a 100% solution to be able to make use of a 90% solution. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
