Five of the top 10 most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch use the Debian package system. It has developed a rich infrastructure of utilities -- not just the core commands apt-get and dpkg, but also such less well-known commands as apt-cache, apt-spy, and apt-listbugs.

Fedora's Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater.

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

A short introduction to package management. Provides an overview of YUM (RPM-based distributions) and Aptitude (Debian and its derivatives).

Package management in OpenSUSE in recent years has had its share of challenges. In OpenSUSE 10.1, the package management was an epic trainwreck. Package management in OpenSUSE 10.3 is as good as that was bad. There are various types of speed improvements. Some of them huge. There is some caching of the repository package info. Progress bars so the user knows what’s going on.

I’m a Debian user and—like many—I use apt and its associated tools. If you haven’t yet discovered apt here’s a brief summary of some of it and some of its tools which can make your package management even more powerful.

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies.

In this article we will be covering all of the changes in and around the package management stack in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0. The new package management is among the fastest, most memory efficient and featureful PM stacks available. There have been a plethora of both visual and behind-the-scenes changes.

NixOS is designed as a test of Nix, a new package manager designed to overcome key problems with existing package managers. As a result, what you think of NixOS is likely to depend largely on your interest in package management.