In other words, why does, almost each distro has its own package manager?
What are the advantages of this? Clearly, the disadantage of this, is that I have to learn about the packman to the distro I'm working on (not a LOT of work, but still takes some reading time)

Why not just, combine all the good stuff about each packman into one cool packman that will be used in all distros?

If it was as easy as said, it would've been done by now.
The diversity in Linux ecosystem has its pros and cons.


Regards.

s/standards/package managers/: http://xkcd.com/927/

2 members found this post helpful.

Here's an interesting discussion on different package management techniques:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/...06/pkgmgt.html

Philip

It wouldn't be as much fun if all Operating Systems were the same. I enjoy being able to use several distros, I never get tired of the same old look and feel as I can with Windows. Also, most package managers are on all other systems, for example, tar balls are used on almost all systems. Hope this helps, I just wish that they made packages easier to instal.

"One size fits all" doesn't.

1 members found this post helpful.

"Why isn't there one package manager on all distros?" can be answered in the same way as "why are there different distros".
Differing aims.
History.
Politics.
Convenience.
...and probably a few other reasons or expansions of the above.

As said already:
Otherwise why don't we all just use Windows or MacOS? Would save us learning anything else.

"One package manager to rule them all!" - Lord of the package managers. Haha!

Anyway, @everyone: thanks. I guess that's how Linux works, I mean, open source and freedom wouldn't mean anything if it was only just one thing ...

One more thing, can I use a different packman other than the one I'm meant to use? Like for example, I very much liked pacman in Arch, can I use it in Ubuntu, for example?

Hi,
In principle, yes, but in practice, no.

Evo2.

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In a way you answered yourself. You like pacman, but it's the one I like least! Most people find a distro and stick with it, so diversity is not a problem. As a distro reviewer, I've used everything, but I wouldn't be without the essential cheat sheet:
http://distrowatch.gdsw.at/dwres.php...age-management

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Package management systems basically are made of two parts: a) the manager itself and b) the packages it installs and the repositories where it gets the packages. While it shouldn't be hard to install pacman on Ubuntu it will still be of no use, since it can't read the Debian package format used by Ubuntu and does not know about the way the repository is layed out. So before you could actually use it you either would have to rewrite it so that it understands Debian packages repositories or you would have to convert the Ubuntu repositories and packages to Arch repositories and packages.

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Just stick with the one you like and forget about the rest. That can be a solution, Or you can use .tar files and build your applications from source.
However if you like type 'pacman -S <package>' in Arch just type 'sudo apt-get install <package>' in Ubuntu


Good luck to you.

Because, first and foremost, different Linux distributions have very different methods of handling software installation that are simply not compatible.
Second, why would you care? If you want to distro hop, you'd better learn how to handle change.
Third, because the people who create the various distros can do whatever they want in that respect. If you don't like their approach, try something else.