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Is it possible to have more than one package management system on one system?

Example: RPM, deb and .txz on the same partition of Ubuntu.

If it isn't possible, why not?

Linger
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Aster
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it's possible. For example, Debian includes yum and rpm in its standard repositories. Also, many programming languages have their own package management tools, used only for installing modules for that particular language – for example, I have Perl cpanm, Ruby gem, Haskell cabal and Python pip in addition to the system-wide package manager.

However, using two package managers system-wide – e.g. dpkg and rpm – will cause problems very quickly; primarily due to file conflicts when manager A attempts to install a program that has already been installed by manager B.

Also, different distributions have different packaging policies. deb packages are usually built for Debian, while rpm is primarily used by Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, and they use different initscripts, configuration files, and program data locations. Packages using /etc/sysconfig will break on mainly-deb systems.

grawity
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