[wplug] Package-based distros

David Tessitor dttessitor at home.com
Wed Apr 25 18:41:52 EDT 2001


A while back I came across a packaging system which I believe was developed at
the University of Chicago or University of Illinois for use originally with
Unix.  It was created by some of their computer support personnel and was still
actively supported and under further development at the time.  The stuff I read
contrasted it with RPM and gave reasons why it was more efficient.  As I
remember, they had conversion scripts or programs too.  This didn't seem to be
just a quickly thrown together one person dead-end project.  I was able to find
several discussions and references to it at the time.  Unfortunately after a
year or so I can't remember its name, and taking a quick look on the web just
now I couldn't find it.  If I can remember how I came across it, I'll try again
and let you know.

Dave
======

Robert Dale wrote:

> 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




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