Re: What do you wish for in an package manager?

[Laurent Martelli <martelli@iie.cnam.fr>]

>>>>> "Bam" == Brian May <bam@debian.org> writes:

>>>>> "Dwayne" == Dwayne C Litzenberger <dlitz@dlitz.net> writes:

    Dwayne> So my question is: What do you wish for in a package
    Dwayne> manager?

Run fast, and do not do things like update-something twice when
upgrading several packages at once.

    Bam> 1. Built in support for shared NFS systems.

    Bam> See <URL:http://snoopy.apana.org.au/~bam/debian/nfs-dpkg/>
    Bam> for some examples.

I believe that most of the issues raised here can be solved with
higher abstraction.

Currently, installation scripts assume too much about the system. The
/usr/doc - /usr/share/doc transition problems are one consequence of
this. If files were tagged according to some high level criterions, it
would be easier to put change the physical location during
installation. Setting the path in the package is bad idea from that
point of view.

I think that installation scripts should be rather declaratives : in
fact they should not be scripts. It would avoid security problems
because of badly written scripts, and allow easier extensibility by
simply interpreting the declarations in a different way, rather than
having to rewrite all the scripts of all packages.

In short, the current system totally sucks :-) It's cool that it
exists, and it does many things, but it has its limits that can't be
pushed very far without a complete rethinking of it.

(I'm not a subscriber of the list, so if you want me to read your
replies, Cc to me)

-- 
Laurent Martelli
martelli@iie.cnam.fr                        http://www.linuxfan.com/~laurent