Ubuntu installers?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2023-01-06 at 11:12 +1100, Owen Thomas wrote:
> snap, rpm, deb, yum, etc... 

Yum is a front-end utility for rpm (based distros), hence you can use
rpm, you don't need to use yum.

I agree that a distro should only use one package management, IOW Ubuntu
should not use apt and snap.

I disagree that different distros shouldn't use different package
managements. Have you ever build a deb or snap package? I have done
that. Both is very complicated.

However, compared to snap and deb, let alone rpm, building an Arch Linux
pacman package is easy-peasy. Deb and rpm are very old and snaps are
going a completely different way, Arch Linux packages are not that old,
the developers of the Arch package management learned from deb and rpm
and were able to develop something that is way easier to use.

I can't comment on Gentoo ebuilds, but I suspect those also work around
the complexity of deb or rpm. However, the concept introduced by deb and
rpm is very good. Distros that are younger than Suse or Debian can use
those concepts to develop something that is less complicated, since the
spadework was done by Suse and Debian. It's very good that younger
distros can learn from old distros and make packaging way easier.

It's evolution and has nothing to do with a standard that indeed is
missing for Linux. Linux should be POSIX, but it isn't and LSB never was
a standard. Package management needs further development and should be
separated from a standard.