[haiku-development] Re: Package manager

Hi,

I started packaging stuff in the RPM format for Red Hat 4.2 to keep my
system tidy. Later when Freshmeat.net started I contributed the stuff I
was doing to them (that was the Freshmeat RPMs). Then I started to dislike
Red Hat because it was becoming a mess so I switched back to Slackware which 
was the first Linux distribution I had tried. Since then I'm still using 
Slackware but I'm really growing tired of having to do sysadmin chores just
to use my computer (including making packages because the standard ones are a
mess or because they simply don't exist). This is one of the reasons why I am
interrested in Haiku.

I think the big mistake of package managers is trying to accomodate for every 
weird thing an application developer might do. And basically that's what UNIX 
package managers try to do because the packagers do not want to bother 
modifying the software and UNIX developers always come up with their own
way of doing things. But software developers should make their programs
self-contained and behave the way the system expects it to, not the other
way around. Trying to accomodate for every UNIX programs will end up in a 
mess like it exists today in the *BSD/Linux world where each time you want to 
use something you have to learn yet another way of doing things.

Ideally, everything (including daemons) should just be an archive (zip or 
preferably an lzma-based archive format) that you uncompress once with 
expander in /boot/apps or /boot/home/apps and that gets automatically added 
to the leaf menu by way of filesystem attributes. In the case of daemons just 
offer to autostart at boot. Deleting should be just as easy as deleting the 
directory the app is in.

Then there's the problem of add-on libraries and headers. Ideally, I would 
think that there really shouldn't be that many of them as developers should 
use what's native to Haiku instead of reinventing the wheel. However it might 
be possible to use filesystem attributes to work like "pkg-config". And then 
all you'd have to do is unzip them someplace and be done with it.

-- 
Christoph .J Thompson <cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx>

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