On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, Samir M. Nassar wrote: > 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. I doubt it. > The simple answer is that different distros have different reasons for > being. But are they compatible? > 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. Why can't I use four different package systems on the same installation of one distro? The reason isn't philosophical -- there is either a technical reason why I can't do it, or I can do it. The distro might come with only one package management program, but they are all freely available so I ought to be able to compile them all and use them all, if I want to. Mike