Re: what does you think of fink?

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Melomedman said on Dec 17, 2003 at 20:37:22:
> > Is there any other presently available pakaging system that is easier 
> > and more reliable to use than fink?
> > 
> > http://fink.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Not directly related, but this is also an interesting and simple way to
> organize packages and avoid collisions (perhaps too radical for most
> people, but it did gain a small community of packagers):
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html

How does it take care of dependency tracking?  That's really the main
issue with packaging.

http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage/management.html 
says nothing about dependencies, upgrading dependencies without
breakages, etc, and blithely claims "Most package managers don't
provide any other operations" (than installing packages and removing
all files from an installed package.)  That suggests to me that DJB,
for all his undoubted talents, hasn't spent much time thinking about
the real issues of package management (and probably runs a rather
minimalistic desktop which he doesn't upgrade very often).

So far the best solution I've seen is debian's apt.  FreeBSD's ports
can break quite seriously (and can't handle multiple versions well);
portupgrade alleviates the problem but at the cost of sometimes having
to recompile almost your entire system when, say, gettext or libpng
undergoes an incompatible upgrade.

Rahul