Though IMO the main issues with APT/dpkg are not related to their UI. It is their decades-old internals, and very limited support for transactional/atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Upgrading an APT system is the same launch-and-pray operation as on most Linux systems. I see that oma has an `undo` command, which is great, but I wonder how reliable that is in practice.
I think that every modern OS should support safe upgrades and rollbacks. Nix and Guix are obviously built from the ground up with this in mind, but they both leave a lot to be desired as far as UX goes. Nix more so than Guix. It is these package managers that would benefit the most from a good UI/UX polish.
So for a new OS/distro, I would start with a package manager with solid fundamentals, and work on refining their UI/UX, rather than do the same for one with fundamental issues such as APT.
BTW, I was interested in learning more about AOSC, but the main site is in Chinese with no English translation, so I guess it's not meant for global use.
Can someone involved with packaging help me understand why dependency management and system configuration are integrated and not separate things entirely?
For instance, if I "install" LXQT on Ubuntu LTS, it's going to not only install all the dependency libraries (and the dependencies' dependencies) as well as all the relevant executables.. but it's also going to go around and change a bunch of configurations so that when I boot LXQT boots instead of whatever I used before.
Why would it not make sense to have installing libraries/executables and their dependencies be decoupled from all the twiddling config files and setting up the spiderweb of userland processes?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadit of course works with Arch pacman -Ss, Gentoo qsearch, etc.
Though IMO the main issues with APT/dpkg are not related to their UI. It is their decades-old internals, and very limited support for transactional/atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Upgrading an APT system is the same launch-and-pray operation as on most Linux systems. I see that oma has an `undo` command, which is great, but I wonder how reliable that is in practice.
I think that every modern OS should support safe upgrades and rollbacks. Nix and Guix are obviously built from the ground up with this in mind, but they both leave a lot to be desired as far as UX goes. Nix more so than Guix. It is these package managers that would benefit the most from a good UI/UX polish.
So for a new OS/distro, I would start with a package manager with solid fundamentals, and work on refining their UI/UX, rather than do the same for one with fundamental issues such as APT.
BTW, I was interested in learning more about AOSC, but the main site is in Chinese with no English translation, so I guess it's not meant for global use.
For instance, if I "install" LXQT on Ubuntu LTS, it's going to not only install all the dependency libraries (and the dependencies' dependencies) as well as all the relevant executables.. but it's also going to go around and change a bunch of configurations so that when I boot LXQT boots instead of whatever I used before.
Why would it not make sense to have installing libraries/executables and their dependencies be decoupled from all the twiddling config files and setting up the spiderweb of userland processes?