Continuing our thoughts on RPM, why package management?
At first glance you may say to yourself, “I can manage this myself. It’s not that many components …” In fact, for something as small as, say, cat, which has one executable and one man page, this may be so. But consider, say, PHP, which has a mountain of modules, dependencies. Keeping track of it all would be tough, if not impossible.
Package management makes it all easier. By letting a program maintain the information about the binaries, their configuration files, and everything else about them, you can identify which ones are installed, remove them easily or upgrade them readily, as well.
Installation becomes a snap. You select what you want, and ask the system to take care of the dirty work for you. Unpack the program, ensure that there is space, place things in the right order, and set them up for you. It’s great, it’s like having a valet take care of your car when you go to a restaurant. Dependencies, or additional requirements for a software package, are also managed seamlessly by a good package manager.
Management of installed packages is also greatly facilitated by a good package management system. It keeps a full list of software installed, which is useful to see if you have something installed. More importantly, it makes upgrading a breeze. Lastly, this makes verification of a software package quite easy to do. By knowing what packages are installed, and what the properties of the components are, you can quickly diagnose a problem and hopefully fix it quickly.
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