Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

One of the main uses of the System Restore functionality of recent Windows systems is to return a system to a working state after installing some new software. That is the sort of scenario that is discussed in an article I read about why System Restore should be used.

That article got me thinking, however. Is System Restore-type functionality really needed if one’s system offers a solid package management system? I’m thinking of quality package management system along the lines of FreeBSD Ports, pkgsrc, or Debian’s APT. They allow for software to be easily installed, updated, and removed. Dependencies are tracked such that any attempt to remove a library that other applications or libraries depend on will result in a warning message of some sort, at the very least. This may help prevent many of the problems that System Restore is needed to deal with on Windows when adding or removing applications.

The concept of a centralized package management system is no doubt foreign to most Windows users. There is the “Add/Remove Programs” functionality accessible from the Control Panel, but it pales in comparison to pkgsrc, FreeBSD Ports or APT. It’s also quite questionable how the various developers of Windows software would react to such a system. While the software of most open source projects can easily by integrated into package management systems by people other than the developers, this is likely not the case for many Windows-based products. So it seems unlikely to me that Windows will ever get a packaging system on par with the various open source systems.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 5:38 am and is filed under Open Source, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.