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Add to SafariWhen comparing DPKG (Debian Package Manager) vs GNU Guix, the Slant community recommends DPKG (Debian Package Manager) for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” DPKG (Debian Package Manager) is ranked 4th while GNU Guix is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose DPKG (Debian Package Manager) is:
Due the popularity of Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint it is almost certain that you find the package you want as a pre-built deb package.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro De facto package manager / widely used
Due the popularity of Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint it is almost certain that you find the package you want as a pre-built deb package.
Pro Great multiarch support
DKPG has one of the best multiarch support you can easily add new architectures with dpkg --add-architecture $ARCH to install foreign architectures.
Pro Follows the UNIX philosophy
DPKG and it frontends follow strictly the UNIX philosophy that one package should do one thing well.
eg:
Dpkg: does simple package management
APT and aptitude : adds repository and dependency tracking
debconf: does configuration
synaptic: allows mouse interaction to all apt/aptitude options
Pro Fast
DPKG isn't as bloated as other package managers since it is only made for local package management.
Pro Very easy to create packages
There are plenty of helpers to easily create packages.
You just need to create 5 files: source/format, compat, rules, control & changelog and run dpkg-buildpackage.
Pro Standard archives
Deb packages are simple ar archives with additional tar, lzma, bzip, gzip support.
Pro Plenty of frontends
You can use apt, aptitude, cupt, debdelta or apt-build on the terminal.
Pro User interaction
It is possible to interact/ask questions to all pre and post install scripts. This makes it possibe to add questions for package configuration or to display EULA/License screens that have to be accepted before installation.
Pro You can create deb packages on almost all linux distributions
This makes maintenance and support easy.
Pro Can setup a shell which has exactly the defined libraries available
A method which works across languages and provides a reproducible programming environment.
Pro Can always roll back to a safe state
Guix creates new profile generations for each operation. If anything goes wrong, a simple --roll-back gets you immediately back to the previous, working, generation. Because it is a purely functional package management system, generations don't affect each other, so you're back to the exact same state as before : still working.
Pro Can create independent packages
Guix pack creates packages which do not need Guix to be run.
Pro No side effects when building packages
Guix is a purely functional package management system. This means that the act of building a package does not have side effects, such as destructively updating or deleting files that may be used by other packages.
Pro Can build containers right-away, from docker to tarballs
See guix pack --help and here.
Pro Easy to add your own packages
The clean and declarative syntax makes it easy to define new packages by using an existing one as an example.
Pro Doesn't require root privileges
Normal users can install packages on a Guix-enabled system, or even run their own Guix instance if the system isn't Guix-enabled.
Cons
Con Does not work well with packagekit
Since packagekit was developed with rpm in mind it does not support all dpkg features.
Con Package creation needs more than one file
A debian package needs at least the following files to build it with debhelper
debian/source/format - deb format
debian/changelog - changelog file with version number and dae etc.
debian/compat - debian package version
debian/control - package information, dependencies & co
debian/copyright - license information
debian/rules - the make file to build the package
However the really important files are control, changelog and rules all other are generic.
Con Updates take a long time
It's gotten better over time but both updating Guix itself and updating the installed packages can take a long time.
Con Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions
While the functional approach that Guix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions.
