I hope that more and more distros adopt Autopackage, if and only if, when it supersedes RPM,DEB and TGZ. I wish that all distro's had a uniform package system, so that we dont have to go hunting for rare software to install a simple program like Gaim.
I am always promoting Linux everywhere I go, and one of the reasons people don't switch is because they have seen Linux and don't like how it installs software (to complicated for them). The other reason I get a lot is, lack of commercial software. Granted, the latter has nothing to do with this post.

We need to combine all the positives of ALL the package systems to create the best all-purpose package handler. A system that can solve dependencies, turn tar.gz's into packages, emerge software (like gentoo) and most of all, have it be CLI based with multiple GUI frontends that are easy to learn and deal with, so newcomers can simply install, examine, uninstall and organise their software.

But until then : ./configure && make && checkinstall, for turning source into TGZ's

TGZ IMHO is the best package management system at this point.

How do you feel about this????

A Slacker

As a Gentoo user, I think portage is a pretty effective solution. I've always liked installing from source.

I love portage, but installing from source is definitely not for everyone. It'd be great if there were a unified package management system that *anyone* could use - without having to know the names of RPM update servers, or how to mount a CD and configure installation sources or how to untar, configure, make and install a tarball, or resolve a hundred dependencies, or any of that nonsense. Portage comes pretty close, as does Apt, but they're somewhat lacking in usability and friendliness. Newbie or non-geek users are more likely to say "Hey I need a spreadsheet program... how do I get one?", and shouldn't have to know that obscure names like gnumeric or oocalc are going to give them what they want.

Someday, it will come

I still think portage is an answer. It's an underlying system that is able to retrieve and install packages automatically. It's extremely portable, and it actually supports binary packages as well. In terms of user friendliness, we just need a better front-end. If the categories are well-described, as well as the individual applications, I think new users could use it.

You've just described FreeBSD.

I would love to try Gentoo, but i have no time to do a stage 1 install. Plus I go for the geek factor, so I would feel like I cheated myself if i did a stage 2 or 3.

Also i would love to try one of the BSD's, but my Slackware system is on my whole hard drive and I dont want to tamper with it.

post.I think getting commercial software and autopackage have a lot to do with each other. The companies that produce games and commercial home software want to be able to sell on shelves at Walmart and other stores. They can't do that until there is some form of unified package management system. They can't include an rpm for every possible distro, and the people that make these impulse buys don't want to use the command line or find a website and download libraries.

i do definitely agree with what has been said here, and i do hope that the big distro's unite and work on a package system that can work across the board.

The problem is that we can end up making the system worse by just creating new package managing systems. Maybe some sort of universal package could be created, that anyone could convert into their distributions preferred package with a command.

Not sure how well im explaining this, or even how possible it would be. But lets say that you could download a universal package, say foo.pac. If your on a slackware system you could do something like

convert foo.pac -slackware

and it magically turns into a .tgz! Or say convert foo.pac rpm, or whatever. If this was able to happen then systems could keep using the method they prefer, but people writing the software would only have to distribute it in a single package.

I should point out that iv very very little experience in package management and the formats that they all use, but we need something that at least makes things easier. I usually prefer to compile from source, but most people dont even know what source code is, or what compiling is.

I was quite happy as far as installing software on Mandy 10 though, iv found it difficult before (rpm dependancy hell) but iv had much fewer problems this time round

Go Portage Go!!

With all due respect to BSD.