Re: Does anybody know of the original motivations to have dpkg and apt.
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 04:19:55AM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Hi all,
> Does anybody know the original motivations for having dpkg and the
> apt. I do remember reading somewhere that Ian Murdock had some issues with rpm
> (urpmi or whatever it was called circa '93-'94) either with dependency
> conflict resolution or/and the updates/upgrades.
RPM was originally written in 1997, dpkg was originally written before
or during 1994, as can be seen in it's changelog.Debian.gz. It's thus
much older than RPM.
APT was created around 1997 and 1998 as a replacement for dselect. The
rest can be read in the Wikipedia article, which also contains links
to the relevant entries in the mailing list.
>
> My google fu is not good at finding things which are over 10 years old
> so any help would be appreciated. I want to use the info. for a
> presentation. The historical reference of dpkg in wikipedia is pretty
> weak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpkg#History as it does not delve
> why they wanted or had to use dpkg . I am not looking for dpkg vs rpm
> or anything like that but more for understanding the reasons behind
> it. Also want to use it in a presentation so people are aware of the
> same.
When dpkg was created, the world of Linux distributions probably had
just Softlanding Linux System and its descendant Slackware. Dpkg was
likely the first time packages received any dependency information.
--
Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member
See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
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