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.
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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.
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...