The disappearance of packaging

One key differentiator between different Linux distributions has been the packaging system used. The same is happening in the world of Illumos distributions, some use IPS, some debian packaging, SmartOS uses pkgsrc, Tribblix sticks true to the retro feel of Solaris by using SVR4.

Overall, there's been a huge amount of effort expended on packaging. Consider the replacement of SVR4 packaging with IPS - a huge multi-year multi-person effort, that required almost the whole of Solaris to be retooled to fit. And yet, this is all wasted effort.

When choosing a packaging system for Tribblix I deliberately chose SVR4 for 3 reasons: it was compatible with what had gone before, it was something I was familiar with, and it was reasonably lightweight and simple. If I had come from a Linux background, I may well have just gone with rpm or dpkg. The key is simplicity and minimal footprint.

What of packaging in the future? I see it largely disappearing. You can see this in the consumerization of applications: it's the App Store, not a package repository. Package management is conspicuous by its absence in the modern world of IT. Looking at where Ubuntu are heading, you can see the same thing. That's not the only initiative - look at AppStream for another example.

And that brings me back to using SVR4 in Tribblix - it's about the lightest weight packaging option I have available. And frankly, it's still far too bloated and complex. But it's merely an implementation detail that is largely invisible, and I want it to become less visible than it is at present.

The point here is that packages aren't relevant to users. Applications are. Which is why the notion of overlays is central to Tribblix - at their simplest, overlays are simply collections of packages (I could have used the term cluster, but that already has meaning to the Solaris installer, although it was never exposed to administrators later which was a terrible design), but the idea is that you manage software at the level of abstraction of an overlay, rather than at a package level.

Even as a unit of delivery, packages aren't that useful - they normally arise as build artifacts, which don't necessarily map well to user needs. And that's another thing - what constitutes a useful component of a package isn't fixed, but is very much context dependent. Worse, the possible contexts in which a package can be used isn't known ahead of time, so the packager cannot enumerate all the possible uses of the software they're packaging. And an individual package is almost never useful in isolation - most working applications are the leaf nodes of a large complex tree. Dependency management is another game where, if you play, you lose. Rather than tightly-coupled systems with strong dependency management, I'm looking for loosely coupled largely self contained units of delivery. If necessary, application bundles manage their own dependencies rather than relying on the system to do so.

Despite the title, it's not that packaging will disappear, but it will (I hope) become largely invisible.