57

I am currently looking for a website or a tool that would allow me to compare the package state of a particular software in different Linux distributions.

For instance, which version of gimp is provided by Mint, Ubuntu, Debian Sid and Fedora 18?

An immediate interest would be to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel when packaging software (for instance re-use patches from other distros).

Improve this question
1
  • 1
    For those who end up here, I added all the suggestions in this page to alternativeto.net Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 11:36

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
45

whohas package (link) may help you.

Example

% whohas pidgin|grep "pidgin " MacPorts pidgin 2.10.6 https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/net/pidgin/Portfile Slackware pidgin 2.7.11-i486-3sl slacky.eu Slackware pidgin 2.7.0-i486-1 salixos.org Slackware pidgin 2.7.0-i486-1 slackware.com OpenBSD pidgin 2.9.0-gtkspell 8.3M OpenBSD pidgin 2.9.0 8.3M 16-Aug-201 Mandriva pidgin 2.10.6-0.1.i586 http://sophie.zarb.org/rpms/a6ec6cd30f5fa024d14549eea375dba4 Fink pidgin 2.10.6-1 http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/pidgin FreeBSD pidgin 2.10.6 net-im http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/net-im/pidgin FreeBSD e17-module-everything-pidgin 20111128 x11-wm http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/x11-wm/e17-module-everything-pidgin NetBSD pidgin 2.10.6nb5 10M 2012-12-15 chat http://pkgsrc.se/chat/pidgin Ubuntu pidgin 1:2.10.0-0ubuntu2. 695K oneiric http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/pidgin Ubuntu indicator-status-provider-pidgin 0.5.0-0ubuntu1 7K oneiric http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/indicator-status-provider-pidgin Debian pidgin 2.7.3-1+squeeze3 706K stable http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/pidgin Debian pidgin 2.10.6-2 591K testing http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/pidgin Debian indicator-status-provider-pidgin 0.6.0-1 33K testing http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/indicator-status-provider-pidgin Source Mage funpidgin 2.5.0 test Source Mage funpidgin 2.5.0 stable Source Mage pidgin 2.10.6 test Source Mage pidgin 2.10.5 stable Gentoo pidgin 2.10.6 http://gentoo-portage.com/net-im/pidgin Gentoo pidgin 2.10.4 http://gentoo-portage.com/net-im/pidgin
Improve this answer
3
  • 2
    + It also shows what other Unices have! Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 12:20
  • Great, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! Commented Jan 25, 2013 at 1:05
  • Must be a really good package, I should start using it :) Commented Jan 28, 2013 at 21:01
31

You can use the Repology website.

Repology monitors a huge number of package repositories and other sources comparing packages versions across them and gathering other information. Repology shows you in which repositories a given project is packaged, which version is the latest and which needs updating, who maintains the package, and other related information.

It has some other useful features such as statistics for the repositories that it supports.

Here's a screenshot of its page for the versions for GIMP:

Repology

The legend for the label colours can be found at the bottom of this page. In short:

Legend

Improve this answer
28

The closest thing I've come across to a tool like this is pkgs.org:

pkgs.org - Linux Software Catalog and Packages Search The pkgs.org is created to provide you with the simplest method of searching and downloading the newest versions of the best Linux software - without the usual excessive popups or spyware. Also use it to find alternatives to commercial packages with expensive licensing fees and complicated restrictions.

Features

  • Search for RPM, DEB, TGZ, TXZ packages from well-known repositories of the ALT Linux, Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Mint, OpenMandriva, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, RHEL, ROSA, Slackware, Ubuntu distributions;
  • Packages search by name, filename, summary, description, requires, provides, files and directories;
  • Powerful packages browser (summary, description, files, requires, provides, changelog, etc.);
  • Install Howtos for all available repositories;
  • Free Software Catalog;
  • RSS & Twitter;
  • Fast servers to make your packages search as fast as possible;
  • All packages are downloaded only from the official repositories!
Improve this answer
3
  • Seems nice! Would have been better if we regroup packages per project using upstream/source name (to avoid having 3/4 packages per project: dev, doc, dbg, etc.). Anyway, thanks and sorry cannot upvote your answer yet. Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 5:09
  • Love this site! It'd be even better if it had some way to link common package names across distros and coorelate this with popularity stats & data (e.g.: The Ubuntu Popularity Contest data) Commented Sep 8, 2014 at 21:52
  • @TrinitronX - Feed that back to the maintainers of that site. I'm sure they'd be interested in ideas for making the site better! Commented Sep 8, 2014 at 22:12
8

Distrowatch has a table show what versions of software specific distros include. If you open your preferred distos in different tabs you can see what version of GIMP they have.

Here's Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, there's a radio button to choose between seeing only the major packages and all packages. Select all packages if your package isn't on the major package list.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    Unfortunately, from I have seen, only the most popular packages are available, it's a pity they don't index more data... Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 5:07
  • Be careful because development releases are often included (Cauldron, Tumbleweed, Rawhide etc.). Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 12:11
0

Similar in vein to Can I Use for web features, there’s Can I Depend which tracks a small set of languages, tools and libraries and languages across Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and SLES:

  • Languages: Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, Lua, Go, Java, NodeJS
  • Tools: CMake, automake, systemd, Ansible
  • Libraries: Qt, glibc, Twisted
Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.