How about portage, or even autopackage? [LWN.net]

How about portage, or even autopackage?

Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:19 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763)
In reply to: The Great Package Management Experiment by torsten
Parent article: The Great Package Management Experiment

Obviously, this article, excellent though it was, has no mention of Gentoo's portage system. I would rate this pretty much on a par with Debian; there's a massive range of packages ready-to-go; and upgrading the entire system involves, as with Debian, just a pair of commands.

But beyond that, portage is aiming to cover some of the things you mentioned. Though Gentoo is source-based, future versions of portage should be able handle binary packages and source installation methods the same way.

Multiple concurrent versions of the same package are already supported, and as for universality, I believe portage is already being "portaged" (sic) to Mac OS X and BSD. Well, it's a start!

I work with Solaris, and I would dearly *love* it to have some of this technology; currently, it's an absolute pain to maintain.

Anyway, the future is either portage, or possibly autopackage - that looks like it could be a killer, if widely adopted.

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How about portage, or even autopackage?

Posted Oct 3, 2003 7:35 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

I'm sorry, but Gentoos package system is pretty far from Debian's. (I say this is
a user who's been running both distributions for quite some time, and prefer
Gentoo for desktop work such as mplayer in the example.)

To start with, you need three different package tools as emerge in itself isn't
very capable. Then there's three or four different ways of masking a package,
so you may well have to go edit the package definition files (ebuilds) in order
to install stuff.

And since emerge in itself is lacking some features, there is simply no simple
way at all to do certain things, such as upgrade a library AND all files that
depend on it. You have to script it or do it by hand.

I love Gentoo as a source distribution and an alternative to LFS (Linux From
Scratch), but if package management is your game, nothing can beat Debian.

How about portage, or even autopackage?

Posted Oct 3, 2003 9:53 UTC (Fri) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]

Well Debian really has a lots of diffrents ways to install packages. You have to use apt-get, dpkg, apt-cache, aptitude or wajig to get everything you want to have. Debian really lacks a tool that will give a good unified interface, but that isn't the UNIX way.. ;-)