Package format wars daydream (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 9 points 1 year ago

Linux mostly follows POSIX standards, even though it's never been certified as compliant, so much code targeting POSIX systems runs on Linux too. In other words, it didn't establish any standards so much as adopt one that already existed.

There is no POSIX standard for package managers, however.

[-] ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's my daydream, imagine if there was one from the start.

this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023

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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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