Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of PackageManagement.
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| Newer page: | version 12 | Last edited on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 12:54:04 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | |
| Older page: | version 1 | Last edited on Thursday, August 15, 2002 12:21:03 am | by PerryLorier | Revert |
@@ -1 +1,10 @@
-RedHat have
[RPM
], [Debian
] have dpkg(8)
, [FreeBSD
] has
it's PortsCollection
.
+PackageManagement gives the SystemAdministrator (whether that be an administrator of a large network of machines, or Joe Schmoe at his single-user Linux desktop) rapid, easy control over which
[Package
]s are installed. The [Package] format and corresponding PackageManagementTool used is one of the major points of difference between [LinuxDistribution]s. In general
, PackageManagement has to perform at least the following tasks:
+
+* install
[Package
]s
,
+* maintain a database of already installed ones,
+* upgrading them,
+* and uninstalling
[Package
]s.
+
+It is nowadays commonly considered a requirement for PackageManagement to also address dependencies - which means
it should make sure to at least notify the SystemAdministrator when they
're trying to install a [Package] that won't work because it depends on other software not currently installed. For example, some [GUI] application may require [GTK] and/or [GNOME] libraries to run. These are of course also provided as [Package]
s. Those may again depend on other packages, which may in turn have their own dependecies - and so on.
+
+As you can imagine, installing any not entirely trivial package can take ages and turn out to be a very frustrating job. Therefor, most contemporary [PackageManagementTool]s were designed to ease the laborous task of meeting all the dependencies of a particular package by resolving them automatically. Binary based distributions usually rely on ''front-ends'' such as [APT] built on top of their original more simple-minded [PackageManagementTool]s, while source based distributions tend to have intelligent dependency management by default. To be able to automatically resolve dependencies, such [PackageManagementTool]s use an external repository (or several ones) of [Package]s, usually at least one run by the distributor
.
