This article was written almost two decades ago or something like that. It's moot now that containers are swallowing everything. That's because containers succeed where all of these cross unix packaging solutions have failed.
"There are too many incompatible packaging formats for unix" "Let's fix that by creating another one!" (update 20110728. xkcd has a comic on this)
That is exactly what the OpenPKG creators said–although I suspect they used different wording. The bottom line is that OpenPKG only adds to the problem that it purports to solve--the problem being cross platform packaging. Instead of picking an already existing platform and working to improve it the authors decided that yet another packaging system would be a good idea. To make matters worse they chose the rpm format but they didn't stop there. They decided that in addition to using an rpm like format that everything should be distributed as source and compiled by the end user.
If any of that sounds familiar it's because it's almost like the authors looked for the worst packaging technologies they could find and decided to put them all together to create SUPER-BAD packaging. What's the worst thing about gentoo? compiling. What's the least friendly packaging format for developers and admins? rpm.
There is no room in this world for OpenPKG.
Each of these platforms is tailored to work a certain way. OpenPKG tries to do a little of each and ends up being mediocre at all.
By using OpenPKG apps do not work well on any of the above platforms and the software is less portable–NOT more portable.
In order for the openpkg platform to attempt to work it has to duplicate utilities and subsystems already existing on the host system. This model forces more utilities upon the user which is more subsystems to administer and cause conflicts, incompatibilities, and headaches. For example, rather than have the option to distribute binaries OpenPKG forces one to install compilers because the packages all need to be compiled. The openPKG system itself needs to be bootstrapped onto the host system. It can't be 'installed'? It has to be bootstrapped!
From a presentation on OpenPKG: http://www.openpkg.org/documentation/presentation/openpkg/slide-050-m.html
"OpenPKG technically consists of the essential openpkg rpm and 880 other RPM packages based on it."
What are they thinking? "'Let' to make cross platform packaging easier by forcing the user to compile 881 packages just for the platform. After that the user needs to compile the actual app that is supposed to run on this platform." (In reality it looks like we only need to compile a subset of those packages but I haven't looked deep enough into it.)
This also causes a delay in updates for my utilities. I want to update to the latest spamassassin for my platform–Oh Wait! I can't because I have to wait for someone to repackage it for OpenPKG. I need to upgrade apache–Oh! I have to wait for openPKG updates for it first.
OpenPKG proponents would probably say "You'll have to wait for your distro or vendor"–BULLSNOT! I can grab the latest tarball from apache, compile it myself, stick it in /usr/local or /opt, and make it work. But I can't do that with OpenPKG based apps because the rest of my app is served out of this bastardized OpenPKG environment and I can't easily take it apart.
As a vendor I might be enticed by the idea of 'cross platform' apps. It's a smoke screen. I'd have to learn to work within the OpenPKG platform. It doesn't cross any platforms. I can use tarballs to be more cross platform than OpenPKG. (TARBALLS just WORK cross platform)
Making cross platform apps is hard enough. We don't need yet another poorly implemented, duplicated, convoluted platform to integrate into our already existing heterogenous environments.
OpenPKG makes life hard for everyone. It needs to die.