Differences between version 12 and previous revision of PackageManagement.
Other diffs: Previous Major Revision, Previous Author, or view the Annotated Edit History
| Newer page: | version 12 | Last edited on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 12:54:04 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 11 | Last edited on Thursday, September 25, 2003 3:21:58 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
* 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.
+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.
