Re: [MiNT] opkg / coldmint

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On perjantai 15 helmikuu 2013, M.A. Kehr wrote:
> Litlle question between, why yet another packaging system? There is now
> gentoo, rpm, deb and now opkg? Are there so many atari users out there,
> that we can afford four different package systems?

Gentoo is a distribution (like Sparemint); RPM, DEB and opkg are package
formats and packaging tools.

RPM and DEB are for managing binary packages, their dependencies,
conflicts and managing the conflicts.

Gentoo package management is only one of these that supports installing
also source packages (which get built on install).  I think Gentoo tools
can produce also RPM & DEB packages.

Opkg, being based on ipkg, is not a real package management,
it's more of a package & package dependency installer.  AFAIK
it doesn't have *any* support for handling package conflicts,
file replacements, alternatives (maybe not even running
package specific scripts?).


But in the end, the package format itself is trivial matter,
be it RPM, DEB or whatever, you can often convert one to another.


However, what *is* important, is the the distribution which
produces those packages.  Different distributions (and therefore
their packages) aren't compatible with each other because for
the same programs / upstream projects, they have different
packaging policies and history, so they:
- configure & build them with different (incompatible) options,
- split the SW for a program differently into binary packages,
- name the packages differently,
- they put configuration files etc in them into different places

so that dependencies between different distros don't work etc.


	- Eero