On Sunday, 17 February 2013 at 21:32:15 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:40:25 +0100
"Dicebot" <[email protected]> wrote:
Packaging is best done (and should be) by OS package manager,
not hundreds of languages-specific managers. Good language
package manager in my opinion is just an information source
for OS package builders.
I'm not real big on the idea of OS package managers. Not when
Unix is
in the picture anyway. I'm getting really fed up with software
that has
a "download / install" webpage populated with totally different
instructions for an endless, yet always incomplete, list of
Linux
variants. And *maybe* BSD. And then on top of that, the poor
*project*
maintainers have to maintain all of that distro-specific cruft.
Unless
they're lucky and the project is big enough that the ditro
maintainers
are willing to waste *their* time converting the package into
something
that only works on their own distro.
I believe I can sum up my thoughts with: "Fuck that shit."
In perfect world that software should have only one download link
- to sources. Habit to get stuff from some probably official web
pages is Windows habit. I have no idea why .deb and .rpm are
provided so often, have never used a single one. Probably habit
again.
Then, if your project is small, it is in your interest to
maintain packages for distros you want (minimal efforts comparing
to software maintenance itself). If it is big, someone will be
willing to do it for you. Simple and works naturally better with
bigger user base.
In return you get one single way to get software from people you
may somewhat trust and sane dependency tracking. Beats anything
for me and recent move towards various repo-like "stores" only
proves it.
