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by gauravphoenix 3955 days ago
Are there package formats older than CPAN? Which is the oldest one?

I did some digging and it seems that RPM, DEB etc were created after 1993 so perhaps CPAN could be father of packaging formats.

1 comments

CPAN was also created after 1993, hence it being 20 years old :p

I don't know when the Debian package format was first created, but dpkg was rewritten in C back in '94[1], so it would predate CPAN. However the real genius of package managers is dependency resolution and the central software repositories - both of which likely came a little while after dpkg. I'd be interested to read more on the history of Debian's package management though - if anyone does find a reference.

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/plain/main/mai...