Thursday, February 3, 2011

Cross-platform Package Manager

One of the reasons I love Ubuntu is apt-get and the huge software repositories that are set up by default. As a developer, I install a lot of software, and being able to install a library or application and all its dependencies with one terminal command is a huge time saver.

So my question - why is there no native package repository on Windows/Mac? And really, why isn't there a cross-platform packaging system yet? (I've seen some attempts to create an "apt-get for Windows" but they all seem to have died out.) Developers could release a single package that would work for any supported OS and be done. The system itself could deal with platform-specific issues so the developer didn't have to. Just a thought.

2 comments:

  1. I think this does exist, but usually for a specific cross platform technology.

    For example - ruby gems. Python pip. Haskell has one.

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  2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_Packaging_System

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