Improving Linux package management
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© Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Linux package managers work too slowly. The experimental distri research project investigates ways to speed up package management.
Package managers differ from each other not only in terms of the package formats they use, but also in their execution speed. Developer Michael Stapelberg has been working on how to streamline package managers such as Debian's Apt or Fedora's DNF to make them faster. He has written blog posts on the subject, given talks, and created an experimental distribution, distri [1] to explore the problem.
Distri is a minimal, command-line distribution for reviewing package management concepts in Linux. This is purely a feasibility study and is not suitable for production use. Distri seeks to be the simplest distribution that is still useful.
Criticism of Debian
Stapelberg, currently a Google developer, was a package maintainer at Debian from 2012 to 2019. Besides maintaining packages of Debian he wrote the i3 Window Manager and the Debian Code Search engine.
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