[wplug] Package-based distros

[Robert Dale]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Zach Paine wrote:

> Time to rant about Debian's package management.. it rocks!!  It is a very
> painless system.  apt-get install whatever will download and install a
> binary package, and apt-get source whatever will download the source for a
> package which you can compile with any flags you may want and then install
> as a package so you never have to break debian's dpkg system.  It is quite
> bomb.

Of course, that works only with packages debian recognizes.

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a package manager which checks
the live system for its dependencies instead of some database or just as
a fallback if it's not found in the database.

So, if you wanted to install some rpm package that required gtk+, but you
installed that from source and therefor not registered in the rpm
database, the package manager would then check the library paths for the
required library.  It would say "lookie, I found libgtk+!  Installing...",
instead of "missing dependencies: libgtk+" (how lame).

-- 
Robert Dale

wplug member since 1998