Research on decentralized package management

[Katherine Cox]

All:

Firstly, I apologize if this is not the appropriate venue for this type of
discussion, but I wanted feedback from the people who steer Ubuntu's
direction instead of meaningless "internet debate" from members of the
community. If there is a better way to discuss this, please let me know! :)
Secondly, I am making the assumption here that I have missed something in my
analysis; I'm not trying to convince anyone, rather I'm trying to educate
myself.

One of the reasons I prefer Ubuntu is because very often it takes pragmatic
stances on issues to allow users to use their computer instead of
maintaining it. This is something I think a lot about, and something I've
specifically been thinking a lot about lately is package management. It
strikes me as the one area that could improve Linux significantly if
addressed properly. Having said that, I am not an expert on package
management nor Linux, so I was wondering if someone might point out the
flaws in my thinking?

It seems to me that a disproportionate amount of resources in *any*
distribution
are consumed by centralized package management. Certainly the distribution
needs to take care of fundamental libraries (glibc, the kernel, the windows
manager, etc.), but why do we attempt to repackage all other software? Isn't
that taking a linear problem and turning it into an exponential problem? As
a software engineer, it is also frustrating that every Linux distribution I
want to support becomes part of my development cycle. If I fix a bug, I
can't just release it to the community, I have to wait until it is
repackaged by each distribution. In my eyes, this only means it's more room
for error as more people not involved with the project touch it, and much
more time until users can get the update.

Has the idea of supporting or developing a de-centralized package management
system for Ubuntu been discussed? Something along the lines of how OS
X/Windows works? I am wondering if the Linux Standards Base has made any
progress in this area as well.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this :)

Kate
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