Hello, I am not an expert so I will just share the different experiences I had with the different package managers I used.
I had a lot of problems with RPMs, conflicts and so on. Especially on Fedora. I had less problems with DEBs, but had once an upgrade breaking in the middle of the operation with Ubuntu, because of a conflict. This is really bad. (The least it could do is to report the problem before starting to do anything.) I have used Arch for 8 months now and like it a lot. pacman just works. It is fast. Do what you want and does not break your system. It handles dependencies with version. ( I am not sure it is as smart as SMART, but I never had any problems) It gives you optional dependencies with what they are useful for. It is fast and easy to use from the command line (I never used any of the GUI for pacman). When there is conflicts, it does not do anything before reporting, and the report is useful. (I never had a problem that took me more than a couple of minutes to solve) Most of all, it neatly allows for building packages from sources with PKGBUILD and makepkg. The PKGBUILD files are very readable and writeable by a human being. (See the example at the end of http://www.archlinux.org/pacman/PKGBUILD.5.html) Apart for the whole system port tree that as PKGBUILD in /var/abs, there are also a lot (16 000) of PKGBUILD in AUR (which proves that they are not very difficult to write). There is also some king of support for unstable packages using CVS/SVN/HG, as well as distcc and cachecc and different signing algorithms. The clever part of the system is in libalpm, a small C library (21 files, apparently) and the rest is in Python, I believe. So maybe it is not so hard to port to Solaris. The only thing is it needs fakeroot to bundle packages, and I am not sure how well it is supported on Solaris. One more thing: there seems to be a backend for SMART to handle pacman more or less planned. (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/smart/+spec/arch-backend) Compared to gentoo emerge/portage, it is less powerful but easier to use for a non-expert. I have used gentoo a bit and liked it quite a lot, but Arch has an easier learning curve and an easier handling of binaries. Of course, the obvious drawback is that there is no big company behind the tool and so it's more risky to build upon it. But the Arch Linux community is quite big now so the risk is probably not so high. So, as an happy user of Arch, I would suggest to have a close look at pacman when choosing your package manager. If it has the features you need, then it is a good choice. By the way, what are the features that you need for the package manager (except the basic ones)? Best regards, Nicolas. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/attachments/20091221/d6ba6eb6/attachment.html>
