Packaging special report

Linux users are blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a wide array of choices for software installation and management — better known as packaging tools. Over the next few days, we’re going to look at some of the packaging options for Linux to provide a useful overview of the packaging landscape.

A few weeks ago Bruce Byfield covered the Free Standards Group’s plans for a cross-format API that may provide tools to simplify installation of software across multiple distros for ISVs. Until those tools come to fruition, though, ISVs — and users — will have to cope with a landscape that is less than unified, but full of interesting options.

Today Byfield covers the Autopackage project, and examines why Autopackage has failed to take the Linux world by storm.

We’ll also take a look at Klik, GoboLinux’s package management, the future of RPM, Zero Install, creating packages for Debian and Ubuntu, and more.

If you have a suggestion for a topic you’d like to see covered in a special report, drop us a note and tell us all about it. We’d also like to know what you’d like more of in the special reports. Do you prefer news and interviews with developers who shape the technologies, or hands-on howtos, or a little of both? Send us an email or leave a comment — and, as always, thanks for reading.