Research on decentralized package management

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:26:25AM -0600, Katherine Cox wrote:
> 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.

I've discussed it in passing with a few people, and have been planning for a
while to write an article about it on my blog, but that's about all I'm
aware of so far.

The current model is complex, but the complexity is justified for highly
interdependent system components which require a lot of care and
integration.  I'm not sure that the tradeoff is justified in the case of
many user-facing applications, because they're more loosely coupled to the
underlying components.  The fact that we treat everything the same way
(while it has advantages) leads to unneeded complexity at that level.

Changing this model would not be easy, but it's possible that the payoff
would be worth it.

-- 
 - mdz