[ale] ubuntu versus fedora

[Michael Trausch]

On Sun, 2010-04-18 at 11:19 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> Are you saying this having had a walk through Gentoo's Portage?

I have used Portage, and it still doesn't really fit what I'd think of
as flexible, robust, and simple.  It seems that in software, the typical
idea is to pick any two of those.

That said, one of the things that I would like to see is a package
manager that does as well with source code as it does with pre-built
binaries, that can transmit both binary and source updates efficiently
in terms of (either source or binary) diffs, that can know when _not_ to
use things like binary diffs, and that can remember a given user's
preferences with a very simple configuration, with the ability to give
choices like Debian's package manager does though the add-on
alternatives system, that provides a clean separation between "system"
packages and "application" packages, the ability to use upstream VCS
systems when they do sane version tagging, the ability to bootstrap the
distribution for the use-cases of a new architecture or a new toolchain
with ease, and so forth.  And let's not forget a stupidly simple user
interface.  True end-users shouldn't even notice that it exists, and the
tools that work on the distribution developer's side should never let
you break things on the end-user's side (e.g., repositories should never
be allowed to have unresolvable cyclic dependencies, should always be
atomically updated, etc., etc.)

Between all the package managers I know of, all of these features exist
(and others in my list).  But I don't know of a single package manager
that has them all.

	--- Mike

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