What do package managers do? Install packages, obviously! But that is not everything. In my opinion, package managers do enough to be characterized as general automation frameworks. For example:
- manage configurations and configuration files
- manage custom compilation options and flags
- provide isolation or containerization
- make sure a specific file is present in a specific place given specific conditions
- change installation files or configuration based on architecture or other conditions
Not all package managers do all of the above, but you get the idea.
Nix even manages your entire setup with a single configuration file.
It occurred to me that package management could theoretically be managed by an automation framework.
What do I mean by automation framework? Ansible, chef, puppet, or Sparrow.
Now imagine if you were to use one of those package managers as an automation framework. For most of them, it would suck. (nix is a notable exception). So maybe common package managers are just bad automation frameworks?
What if we used an automation framework as a package manager? Well currently, it might also suck, but only because it lacks the package definitions. Maybe it is not a bad experiment to have a distribution managed by a modern automation framework like Sparrow.
What are the benefits?
- usable on other distributions
- more easily create your own packages on the fly
- Greater customization and configurability
- use a known programming language that is easy to read to define packages and other functions, instead of a DSL
- your package manager can easily automate just about any task using the same syntax and framework
This is how I know you don’t understand proper package management. The validation cornerstone seems to have been forgotten here.
But you’re close to something. The state of proper package management had us managing systems by updating packages - using files, triggers and templates - and had more responsive code (they call it ‘self healing’ now) than ansible, about 8 years before they even invented the term ‘devops’.
It’s amazing how forgetting the past lets us repeat it. That Ansible is such a dog, almost 25 years after
makeandsedwas most of our engine, shows how much potential Mike squandered.I did not intend to make an exhaustive list of everything package managers do, but validation is a good thing to point out. It further proves that we are dealing with generic automation frameworks.
And just to clarify, I did not mean that something like ansible in its current form is suitable.