Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 19:50 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Why write a new package manager anyway? by johannbg
Parent article: DNF and Yum in Fedora

Dowdle is right that DNF is just a yum fork and not a new package manager but some of that unification is happening already since Panu apparently is looking into merging dependency solving logic (from libsolv) into RPM directly. Red Hat switched from home grown up2date to community developed yum before and could switch again if it is really warranted but it is likely that they are just going to continue to improve yum (via the dnf project as of now).

However if you really want to talk about unification, I don't see Red Hat switching to DEB format or Debian switching to RPM format anytime soon but either of these formats are just tarballs with some additional metadata.

The interesting problems are the large amount of differences in other layers higher up (packaging guidelines, choice of components, home grown solutions like Debian menu etc) and if you unify them all, you will have a single Linux distribution. Not going to happen though but the differences are getting somewhat nullified via other deployment models (language specific ones are prominent now) and also emerging sandbox (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QTgxakyUVFMkvr-xFY2Xg...) and container based models(ex: Docker).

GNOME Software's answer appears to be abstract it out and have plugins support more than just the native packaging format of the distributions. It is a changing landscape and we will see what such efforts evolve into.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 21:23 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (1 responses)

In anycase there is nothing preventing Fedora to switch oh wait yes there is...

"if you unify them all, you will have a single Linux distribution."

For quite sometime now ( couple of years ) the plumbing layer has been slowly moving to the direction of becoming whole which is an move which I see significantly strengthen the GNU/Linux ecosystem but I disagree that we wind up with a single Linux distribution since I philosophize and say what deviates distributions now is not so much the bits but more their philosophy and the communities surrounding each philosophy and those will always exist which also is good.

I agree it's going to be interesting to see if an to what extent GNOME Software changes the landscape for distributions shipping Gnome and distributions in general and I would not be surprised if it became it's own distribution in that process as well.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 18, 2014 10:09 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

" In anycase there is nothing preventing Fedora to switch oh wait yes there is..."

Finish your sentence if you want others to follow your train of thought.

" For quite sometime now ( couple of years ) the plumbing layer has been slowly moving to the direction of becoming whole which is an move which I see significantly strengthen the GNU/Linux ecosystem"

The plumbing layer is consolidating however your idea of consolidating packaging formats is certainly not happening. There is now ever more than before.

" I agree it's going to be interesting to see if an to what extent GNOME Software changes the landscape for distributions shipping Gnome and distributions in general and I would not be surprised if it became it's own distribution in that process as well."

It would have a software center that would act as a distribution point but there is no real reason it would morph into a Linux distribution on its own. I don't see the logical reason or the commercial incentive to do that.