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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]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The package format is almost irrelevant TBH. Most packages are not interoperable between distros due to the versions and names of dependencies. That is not something that gets fixed by a standard package format. Packages don't even work well between different versions of the same distro. largely due to libc - anything that depends on that is built against a specific version and when you upgrade it you need to rebuild and install everything that depends on it. Similar problems exist for all compiled dependencies on a distro.

And while some packages of the same format can be installed on multiple distros (mostly those based of the same foundation) most cannot. This is what the newer package formats (like flatpack) are trying to solve - by including all dependencies inside the package.

So a standard format does not really solve those issues, so there is little advantage for one. At least not one of the old school formats. And the wars are not really over the format, they are over the tooling required for that format. At the end of the day RPMs, DEBs, and arch packages are just tarballs of files and some meta data (and there is even a tool that can convert between them - though anything with dependencies quickly becomes a complete mess). It is the build and install tooling that makes all the difference.

[–] ransomwarelettuce -1 points 1 year ago

Oh ... thx for the insight, it was a daydream anyways looks like the only solution is cloud native if one wants uniformity, still a bit hesitant to have a system so stable I can't change it's core filesystem.