Is distribution-level package management obsolete?
Channel: Donnie Berkholz
Date: 10/02/2014

Note: The sound issues are mostly gone by 2:30. I did my best to remove problems from the original recording but it's not perfect.

Recent trends in software development have raised questions as to whether package management in Linux distributions is still relevant. Whether it's independent package managers in popular Web frameworks and languages (Node.js, Ruby, Python, etc) or bundling and containerization that's become increasingly popular in DevOps culture, it appears that integrated approaches to package management are on the decline. Yet at the same time we've seen package managers in the Windows world such as NuGet grow more popular. This talk from a leader of the Gentoo Linux distribution will explore the reasoning and history behind this shift and whether it's the right move for the FLOSS (free, libre, and open-source software) movement as a whole.

Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/is-distributionlevel-package-management-obsolete.

This talk is from FOSDEM 2014.