Package Management System - Functions

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:

    Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    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)

    The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)