On 16/06/18 00:40, Anton Aylward wrote:
I'm well aware of that. But check the list of available Synaptic download for various distributions I gave the URL for.
Fedora is listed and that uses RPMs.
OK. I *think* I tried this, about 4y ago. It only handles management of .deb packages installed with the Fedora port of dpkg/apt -- it doesn't touch the native package management system. Similarly if you install rpm on a Debian machine. It doesn't replace the whole package-management toolchain.
There is also a link "Using APT on RPM-Based Systems" It should lead to http://www.linux-mag.com/id/1476/ but it doesn't :-( <quote> Now, apt doesn’t actually install packages; instead, it calls rpm to do the grunt work. </quote>
Yes, but that was 15 years ago and it's talking about apt4rpm. http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/ Note that the last change was in 2005. It's a dead project now, AIUI.
As I understand it Synaptics has a version written in Python. Great. I could write a package manager in, say. Ruby using Ruby/Tk and the "Ruby bindings for rpm (package manager)" and the "Ruby bindings for libzypp" Or Perl ..
Well, with the rise of containers and containerised app distribution formats such as Flatpak, Snappy and so on, I think in the next few years, packaging tools are going to recede into the background. I have spent some time trying out Endless OS: https://endlessos.com/ It's an interesting distro. Nicely stripped-down GNOME 3 front end, rather phone-like, with a superficial cosmetic resemblance to the Windows desktop too -- taskbar/panel at the bottom, a launcher at the left end, clock at the right, etc. I believe it's Debian underneath but the shipping OS has no package manager at all. Updates are whole-system-image, based on OSTree, a bit like updating a phone OS. Apps are all Flatpaks. I think it's pointing the way to future distribution architectures. Old Linux hands will hate it -- it's a lot less customisable and open than traditional distros. But, it's a lot more robust, a lot more end-user friendly -- even more so than Windows. The end user experience is more like a phone or tablet, but with the richness of a desktop. So, no, I don't think anyone will put any real work into bridging RH RPM with SUSE RPM with Mandrake RPM, or RPM with DEB, or any of that. By 2020 or 2022, I suspect that only people building distros will be using package managers at all. End users will get read-only root filesystems, transactional updates, and containerised apps -- SUSE MicroOS style. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org