| To the best of my knowledge, Plan 9 eschews dynamic linking entirely and does everything statically. As for package management... the entire model of Plan 9 is such that most conventional things about Unix package management that we take for granted are simply irrelevant. You don't typically deal with things on the package level, but on the file server level - which is inherently versioned, archivable and introspectable through simple tools. You can do things like immediately swap in a library from the file system cache just to test a program to see if it runs on it, then replace it back, all trivially. There have been some bolted on approaches to package management as of more recent [1] [2]. Conceptually, they're no more advanced than Slackware's shell script-based pkgtools, largely because they don't need to be. A Plan 9-ish way to package management would probably involve something like mounting a networked file system to a local share and then maintaining a replica on it. Actual management could then be done through simple mkfiles. A layer on top of that which precompiles and simply union mounts the contents of an archive is certainly possible, too. It's still pretty similar to ports, though, but with less headaches. Ironically, your ideal form of package management is pretty similar to Slax's use of union mounting compressed file system archives, or even Slackware's tarballs that hold directory contents which are unpacked to install. The Linux community doesn't seem to want that. Dynamic linking complicates things. [1] http://man2.aiju.de/1/pkg
[2] http://www.9atom.org/magic/man2html/1/contrib |