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
- xkcd: Standards
- one of the most unappreciated aspects of any package manager is how they handle dependency resolution – the modern formats (Flatpak, Snap, AppImage) “solve” the problem by completely ignoring it altogether and just shoving everything-and-the-kitchen-sink into one blob – which works great as long as storage remains cheap or you’re not trying to develop for embedded systems
- GNU has a package manager – and it’s being used in a current distro
- GNU development tends to be glacial even compared to something like Debian – the GNU kernel is 33 years old at this point …
Flatpak uses runtimes, which is sorta a middle point between traditional package way and and bundling everything. Quite a nice compromise imo
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.
