|
I'm a big fan of macports, homebrew, apt-get and even portableapps.com But many of my favorite apps which are available through Sourceforge or Google Code require manual unzipping, configuring, building, moving etc. etc. Is there some obvious reason that these great project repositories don't have package management systems? | |||
|
feedback
|
This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.
|
Most of the projects hosted on such sites are aimed at Linux, where a distribution has one package management system (such as These distributions also have their own rules on packaging – configure options, locations of certain files, the package format itself; for example, Debian splits many programs into "main", "dev", "dbg" packages, while Arch does not. To build a single package for all distributions, one would have to conform to a logically impossible set of rules; hence each distribution maintains its own repositories. Unofficial extra repositories do exist – many projects hosted on Launchpad have a PPA with packages built for Ubuntu; Arch Linux has an user-maintained AUR; finally, even Mac OS X has MacPorts and Homebrew :) However, all of them are similar in that they are specific to the operating system, but never to a website. | ||||
|
feedback
|
