Template talk:Linux package management systems

SRPM missing

As for RPM being both a sources and binaries format, we should replace with,

RPM sources	Unknown
Source-based (non-RPM)	GoboLinux, NixOS, Gentoo, Source Mage
RPM binaries	dnf, yum zypp, apt-rpm, urpmi, up2date

instead of,

.rpm	dnf, zypp, apt-rpm, urpmi, up2date
Others (source-based)	GoboLinux, NixOS, Gentoo, Source Mage

101.78.166.156 (talk) 06:19, 27 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discontinued / italics

User:NuclearWizard It's WP:BRD not BRRD. You're meant to Discuss here before redoing your edit. As for the merit, yes, per my old comment on the web browser template, italics are used on other templates, but at least one of those in your edit is wrong - per my comment[1] which is not addressed in your revert. "It's used on other software templates, including the web browser template. Please bring your proposal to remove them to the talk page, since we do need a way to distinguish discontinued software from actively developed software." [2] [3]. Of course, the obvious differences are size and obsolescence - old browsers are not secure and quickly use utility, but old PMs not. There is no grounding in the MOS italics for this, so please justify here. Widefox; talk 21:32, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As for Apper, I didn't realize that the most recent update of Apper was in February 2018 (while when I made the original edit, the last update was in 2014 according to its article, and IIRC the website wasn't working properly so I assumed it was dead); I'm sorry for reverting you and it was honestly a mistake in hindsight. That said, I'm obligated to justify my actions.

I actually believe that having discontinued PMs marked as such is just necessary for informational purposes, not so much technical ones. You're right that PMs don't actually go obsolete as fast as web browsers, but by your logic there are clear cases for designating PMs as discontinued. Ipkg and autopackage have not been updated since before 2010; even if they work via means which allow them to continue to update users' software in the current year, I doubt they're secure at this point and they've likely lost quite a bit of utility as well. Some, including ipkg, have been forked; the forks that succeed them almost certainly release security fixes while disclosing which versions are affected and so on, and thus allow the public to know of these vulnerabilities which would exist in discontinued software from which they were forked. Almost all of the discontinued PMs are officially or unofficially superseded, as well.

The closest I can find to one of the currently-italicized PMs being active is that an uncited claim on the swaret article says that it is still in use on a distro called STUX. I looked it up and there is a discontinued distro named STUX, but while it does use swaret, it hasn't been updated since 2008 and is at least moribund if it isn't discontinued outright. Ubuntu SC has been declared discontinued by its developer, Canonical Ltd, and its webpage currently redirects to a presumably newer Canonical service. Likewise, Conary's most recent Github revision was in 2016, and it only services two discontinued distributions.

Finally, regarding alternative methods of demarcating discontinued PMs (as is the case for Template:Software digital distribution platforms) I believe that it would look aesthetically unappealing to do this in the context of Linux package managers, because the scope is so small: Rather than every platform imaginable, this is just a bunch of Linux PMs. As such, dpkg-based PMs are sorted in their own row, separate from RPM-based ones, and so on; they aren't sorted into PC and mobile/console rows because it's unnecessary in context, and may overlap if there's actually mobile distributions which use the same PMs. A discontinued row would need to have all of the things like Ubuntu SC, APT-RPM, etc., and it would be a bit confusing. By the way, as a closing note, thank you for not reverting my reversion and making this into BRRRD, especially considering I took a couple of days to reply to you. Nuke (talk) 14:21, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]