The deb system suffers a lot the age, when it was designed there wasn't so many alternatives nor the high-speed internet and infrastructures like git:
There is no need to redesign the package manager when we already have modern and elegant package manager like Nix or Guix that can help Debian to improve their package system.
If you want to build an entire [operating] system, how exactly do you divide it up and allow people who have probably never met to work on everything individually, yet take all of the subcomponents and put them back together and make a complete system?
The way that Linux systems were distributed at the time was very much oriented toward distribution on diskettes. So you would download all these diskette images, and you'd install Linux that way. And we decided to take a different approach, because it fit well with the distributed development idea.
We decided that Debian would be based on packages. So every sub-component of the system would be contained in its own package. And the package would know how to integrate itself into the system. When you installed it, it would know how to remove itself, and know how to upgrade itself.
Debian would be based on the idea of a package, and all these people who wanted to work on it could then take responsibility for all these different packages. And we would define standards and rules that would allow a package from any source to be able to fit into the system well. So that when you take all these packages and you install them, you get an entire system that looks like it's been hand-crafted by a single, closely-knit team. And in fact that's not at all how it was put together.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...rdock-himself/
The way that Linux systems were distributed at the time was very much oriented toward distribution on diskettes. So you would download all these diskette images, and you'd install Linux that way. And we decided to take a different approach, because it fit well with the distributed development idea.
We decided that Debian would be based on packages. So every sub-component of the system would be contained in its own package. And the package would know how to integrate itself into the system. When you installed it, it would know how to remove itself, and know how to upgrade itself.
Debian would be based on the idea of a package, and all these people who wanted to work on it could then take responsibility for all these different packages. And we would define standards and rules that would allow a package from any source to be able to fit into the system well. So that when you take all these packages and you install them, you get an entire system that looks like it's been hand-crafted by a single, closely-knit team. And in fact that's not at all how it was put together.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...rdock-himself/
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