Just saw a post of a novice user asking why are there so many package managers.

At first I was about to copy and paste the good old “The OS is yours if you want to make a different package manager you can, and many did”.

But then I though

Damn how does Linux have standards !?

And reached a somewhat of conclusion that many of the established standards were established at the early stages of the project, there are of course those who change like the transition from X11 to Wayland the upcoming desktop portals and such.

And here is my hipotesis if the GNU project came up with a good and easy to work package manager in the early days of Linux, do you think we would have so many different ones? Maybe even win the desktop war (OS not DEs)?

Edit: replace package manager with packaging format

  • nyanEnglish
    91·
    8 months ago

    Linux mostly follows POSIX standards, even though it’s never been certified as compliant, so much code targeting POSIX systems runs on Linux too. In other words, it didn’t establish any standards so much as adopt one that already existed.

    There is no POSIX standard for package managers, however.