Package manager

A package management system is a collection of tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages from a computer.

Examples

Free software systems

模板:See also By the nature of free software, packages under similar and compatible licenses are available for use on a number of operating systems. These packages can be easily combined and distributed using configurable and internally complex packaging systems to handle many permutations of software and manage version-specific dependencies and conflicts. Some packaging systems of free software are also themselves released as free software.

For binary packages

• dpkg, used originally by Debian GNU/Linux and now by other systems, uses the .deb format and was the first to have a widely known dependency resolution tool, Deb Installer, APT.
• fink, for Mac OS X, derives partially from dpkg/apt and partially from ports.
• The RPM Package Manager was created by Red Hat, and is now used by a number of other Linux distributions. RPM is the Linux Standard Base packaging format and is the base of a large number of additional tools, including apt4rpm, Red Hat's up2date, Mandriva's urpmi, SuSE's YaST and YUM, used by Fedora Core and Yellow Dog Linux.
• A simple tgz package system combines the standard tar and gzip. Used by Slackware Linux there are a few higher-level tools that use the same tgz packaging format, including: slapt-get, slackpkg and swaret.
• Pacman for Arch Linux uses pre-compiled binaries distributed in a tgz archive.
• Smart Package Manager

For installing from a recipe

• Portage and emerge are used by Gentoo Linux. They were inspired by the BSD ports system and use scripts called ebuilds to install software.
• A recipe file contains information on how to download, unpack, compile and install a package in GoboLinux distribution using its Compile tool.

Hybrid systems

• The FreeBSD Ports Collection, sometimes known as just ports, uses a system of Makefiles to install software from sources or binaries. MacPorts (for Mac OS X), NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's ports collection are similar.

Meta package managers

The following unify package management for several or all Linux and sometimes Unix variants. These, too, are based on the concept of a recipe file.

• klik aims to provide an easy way of getting software packages for most major distributions without the dependency problems so common in many other package formats.
• Autopackage uses .package files.
• epm, developed by Easy Software Products (creators of CUPS), is a "meta packager", that allows to create native packages for all Linux and Unix operating systems (.deb, .rpm, .tgz for Linux, pkg for Solaris and *BSD, .dmg for OS X,...) controlled from a single *.list file.