Re: [system-tools] package-maintaining

[Juan Luis Baptiste <juan baptiste kdemail net>]

On Monday 17 January 2005 17:29, Karel Demeyer wrote:
>
> There are so much answers to the problem of the big number of package
> management systems, most jkust want to create a unified system.  I think
> it's kind of wrong to do that as it 'blocks' competition between
> ditributions, as we'll never see "the ultimate package management".
> Everything can be made better, always.  I mean, we better have a unified
> frontend for all systems then the same package management for all
> distros as it's one of the things a distro makes special.  Sometimes I
> think there should be unified packages, to make new apps spread
> quicklier, and therefor .package etc is a Good Thing, but once g-s-t has
> such a system there should "only" be made a backend for it.
>

Thinking about the "ultimate package managment system" is wrong because at the 
end it will only bring more package managment systems to the playground, what 
make you think that a distro would throw away it's current package managment 
tools to adopt to a new one?

Also having different GUI's in each distro is wrong IMO. As you say, that's 
what makes a distro special, but it's also a problem, because it makes all 
distros a very hereogenious enviroment to work with. If I'm used to the tools 
of one distro and I start using another one I have to go all the way learning 
the new tools, and if I change again to another distro I'll have to do it 
again and again...  This is what  GST tries to avoid (correct me if I'm wrong 
as I'm no t a part of the gst team :)), they try to give to the user an 
unified system administration tool among all distros, because it belongs to 
the desktop that comes with the distros and not belongs to a particular 
distro. That's the same reason by which I started KNetworkConf.

Another reason by which developing a unified backend/frontend stuff for the 
package managment systems is very difficult is that If the package managment 
systems start to change their way of doing things (the options they use, the 
info they manage for it's packages, how to install them, how to resolve 
dependency problems, etc), it would be very difficult to mantain a common GUI 
for all of them. They have to work pretty much in the same manner to be able 
to share a common GUI.


Cheers,
-- 
Juan Luis Baptiste
http://www.merlinux.org
http://knetworkconf.sf.net