Functions
Package management systems are charged with the task of organizing all of the packages installed on a system. Typical functions of a package management system include:
- Verifying file checksums to ensure correct and complete packages;
- Verifying digital signatures to authenticate the origin of packages;
- Applying file archivers to manage encapsulated files;
- Upgrading software with latest versions, typically from a software repository;
- Grouping of packages by function to reduce user confusion;
- Managing dependencies to ensure a package is installed with all packages it requires. This resolved the problem known as Dependency Hell.
Some additional challenges are met by only a few package management systems.
Read more about this topic: Package Management System
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that there are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)