[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Does anybody know of the original motivations to have dpkg and apt.



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 »

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


Reply to: