Linux Software Installation Made Easy

Software on Linux

Software installation should be one of those areas where Linux shines. I mean, almost everything you need is free! Freely available, free to download, free to run, free to modify, free free free.

Many distributions have gone to great lengths to make it easy to find and install new software. My personal favorite is Debian's (and thus off-shoots like Ubuntu's) APT/dpkg system. APT, along with whatever front-end you prefer using, makes it pretty trivial to find and install lots of great programs.

But, there are two problems...

1. Typically you can't get the latest version of whatever program you're installing because APT / RPM / whatever pulls from your distro's repository, tagged with its version. It doesn't matter if Firefox 1.5 is out if the latest version of your distro came with 1.0.7. Sure you can download and compile the latest source from the upstream vendor, but then your package system has no idea what you've done. Everytime you do this, you make your package system a little more useless and your /usr/local/ hierarchy becomes a den of unpatched security holes, orphaned files, and in other ways a throwback to pre-package system Linux life. Not a place I want to be.
2. Extensions, plugins, and libraries that are managed with their own package management systems (e.g. CPAN, Ruby gems, etc.) are typically only partially represented in the distro's package repositories, if at all. These systems, more than others, contain lots of little packages that need to be more up-to-date and don't really need much distro-customization. Additionally, it's sort of silly to duplicate CPAN in an APT repository. What a duplication of effort!

Gentoo to the rescue?

One distro (at least) partially solves the 2nd problem in a unique way. Gentoo comes with a script that loads Perl modules from CPAN and records them in emerge's package metadata so the package system thinks you merged an ebuild that just happened to contain the latest CPAN version of whatever Perl module you wanted. However, you have to check whether or not there is an official ebuild before using this script, and it's still a different system that's not obvious unless you read about it in a forum or something.

As far as problem #1 goes, Linux is way behind the times. Think about what you do when running Windows or Mac OS X when a new version of Firefox comes out. You go to mozilla.com and you download it and install it (well, on OS X you drag it to the hard drive, which is infinitely superior to both Linux and Windows' complex installation systems, but more on that in another post). Why can't we do that in Linux? Yeah, yeah, I know we can, but I want it to be kept track of by the package system. If it were Windows or OS X, uninstallation would be no more painful than installation. Not so on Linux.

Gentoo kinda gets around this problem by relying on the upstream source code as the "base" of its package installations (because they aren't binary packages until you compile the ebuild on your system). Ebuilds are just recipes that have compilation instructions, package metadata, and some patches for the source. This allows Gentoo to be a little more nimble in terms of keeping up to date with the latest releases. However, the more complex the software or the more major the version bump, the less true this is. Additionally, (in my experience) you lose some of the stability and system robustness of running a set of programs and libraries that are well tested together.

I used to run Gentoo for its up-to-date-ness. It was nice only having to wait a few days (usually) to be able to install the latest version of a new software package. New version, package system knows about it, we're all good.

But, the instability finally got to me. Package versions were changing all over the place, constantly. Half the time my system couldn't tell where in the world the most basic libraries could have gone (hint: they were right where they'd always been). Things that used to work would suddenly break. If I wanted this, I would run Windows, sheesh!

Turning the problem into an advantage

So, I switched to Ubuntu. I missed Debian's reliability, but not its staleness. Ubuntu seemed a happy medium, and indeed it is. In fact, it's so close to software nirvana, I think there's only one more thing it needs to fully achieve it.

Both problem #1 and problem #2 can be solved with a little standardization. No, I'm not talking about standardizing on One Package System To Rule Them All. That ain't gonna happen anytime soon. No, what we need is a little standardized metadata that gives whatever package system you're using enough info to know you installed something not from the distro and how to uninstall it later (as well as fun things like automatically uninstalling it when/if a newer version comes up for availability in the official repositories). This metadata should be defined by someone like freedesktop.org, and then dpkg, rpm, emerge, etc. should be modified to handle it.

Brave New World

Let's say it's far into the future and my vision has been fully realized. I'm running the "Blubbering Bass" version of Ubuntu and it came with Firefox 3.1. However, the super sweet Firefox 4.0 has just come out and I want it! All my friends running Mac OS 11 and Windows XP We're Sorry Vista Sucked So Bad Edition can just download it and install it. But, so can I! The file that mozilla.com is offering for Linux is just a regular .tgz source tarball. However, it has a special file inside called "install" which I can either run from a terminal or my distro can run for me when I right-click the tarball in my desktop environment and select "Install..." from the menu.

This nifty file would put some metadata about this program in a standard place that my package manager knows to check. It would say, hey, I'm installing Firefox 4.0 into this directory. My package manager would then know Firefox 4.0 existed in the system and where it lived. It would then be able to uninstall it and possibly monitor for security problems with the version I installed.

Additionally, when I ran the CPAN shell or the Ruby gem installer, these programs would also put this metadata in the right place so that my package manager knows about what crazy stuff I've installed with them.

This would make Linux the best of both worlds in the software installation department. When something new comes out, download it and install it, just like your proprietary-OS-using friends. Same goes for CPAN modules and Ruby gems. If you start having issues with some of the programs, you can run a quick little "revert to distro version" function that will get you back on track with the tried-and-true version of the program in question.

Obviously this is only the tip of the iceberg here; you could imagine extending this system to allow the installation of RPM's on Debian-based systems (although alien already does a pretty good job here), or other crazy things like that. But I'll not get into all that for now.