On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 04:26:36PM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote: > 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. <snip> > 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. I've briefly looked into this in the past. I think that your "Linux" assumption is fundamental to justify the last sentence. FreeBSD got the "ports" system back in 1993. Even though it was (and still is) a source-based system, its role is very similar to the things that today we call "package management systems". As far as I can tell from various sources (e.g. [1]), dependencies were already part of it. If someone has (pointers to) more (accurate) information on this matter, I'll be glad to hear them. Cheers. [1] http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/freebsdports.html -- Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o . Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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