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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Package format wars daydream (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ransomwarelettuce to c/[email protected]

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Just saw a post of a novice user asking why are there so many package managers.

At first I was about to copy and paste the good old "The OS is yours if you want to make a different package manager you can, and many did".

But then I though

Damn how does Linux have standards !?

And reached a somewhat of conclusion that many of the established standards were established at the early stages of the project, there are of course those who change like the transition from X11 to Wayland the upcoming desktop portals and such.

And here is my hipotesis if the GNU project came up with a good and easy to work package manager in the early days of Linux, do you think we would have so many different ones? Maybe even win the desktop war (OS not DEs)?

Edit: replace package manager with packaging format

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[–] ransomwarelettuce 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah of course I get your argument although we have rpm (or deb in debain based distros) across redHat and OpenSUSE it does not mean that the same rpm package would work on both systems due to distro specific aspects (like different root structures, init systems etc . . .), but that's something for the package manager to solve, the package format could be agreed upon, which would ease the workload of developers and maintainers since the moment you know the target distros of a package they could see the base differences of said distros and add symlinks, dependencies, environment variables, services ... as needed for the package.

This seems like it could lead to a whole lotta of conflicts, but I think if the daddy distros were designed all with one package format in mind, such format could be somewhat interoperable.