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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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...