On Tuesday 18 December 2007, Mike Miller wrote:
> It seems to me that there are several package management tools and that
> different Linux distros use different tools.  I assume that several Linux
> distros are in compliance with the LSB (for locations of libraries and
> such).  Why can't all package management tools from such distros be
> interchangeable?  What is the source of incompatibility, if there is any?

This is a philosophical question and the answer is philosophical.

The simple answer is that different distros have different reasons for being.

A more complex answer would be that it is hard to make community distros like 
debian and gentoo have the same priorities as Fedora or Ubuntu or openSUSE. 
For one, you can't just pay a software engineer to make a package management 
tool that can work with all packages. You can, but your money won't be 
well-spent.

-- 
Samir M. Nassar
samir.nassar at steamedpenguin.com