package management tests: Debian, Mandrake winners

[Peter L. Peres]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, William Park wrote:

> Hey, what's wrong with .tgz format? ;-)  Slackware keeps list of files
> installed, so that you can remove them when uninstalling.  In fact,
> that's what people do anyway when "upgrading", ie. remove old files,
> then install new files.

Most important, you can open/create/manipulate slackware packages using
any os (even windows) because the format is tgz and all scripts are shell
scripts that will run anywhere (almost). F.ex. if you port something to
cygwin/win32 slackware packages are the only straightforward option I know
of. Same for opening a package on a Sun w/o rpm deb and so forth.

Since the scripts are shell scripts there are no limits. You want a Prolog
AI installer with Postgresql backend to keep track of packages and an
Apache/PHP front end to it ? You got it (you only need to write a 'few'
lines of code).

I could never understand why people looked down on Slackware installation
systems. After all its scripts are written in the shell script that boots
and runs the whole machine. How could that (being a fully featured
programming language with full access to the system as root) be inferior
to a specialised application ?! You can even write a package install
script that produces a rpm package out of itself! Now try the opposite
using a rpm package!

Peter

PS: I am biased. I started with Slackware and i spent an inordinate amount
of time tinkering with Slackware before moving on.
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