On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:02:16 +0100 "Dicebot" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Monday, 18 February 2013 at 11:51:14 UTC, Nick Sabalausky > wrote: > > ... > > Ugh, have you ever tried to do it in practice? 'Course not, because why should I? With OS-independent language package managers, all I have to do is toss into a trivial ./build script the few commands (if even that much) needed to grab the dependencies (via DUB/Orbit/Gems/whatever) and launch my buildscript, with only minor tweaks for the build.bat variant (which most Win users won't even need to use at all since a prebuilt .exe is pretty much guaranteed to work out-of-the-box). That's *all* I need for it to work for *everyone*. *And* nobody needs to deal with a long list of "If you're on OS A do this, if you're on OS B do this, OS C do that, etc." Or I can use the OS-based stuff and have it only work for *some* people on *some* OSes. Yea, that sounds really worthwhile. Even if it *is* super-simple, as a lib or app developer I still have no reason to even do so at all in the first place. > Because I have > been maintaining few packages, primarily for Arch Linux, and it > is not even remotely close to what you say. There may be some > bureaucratic headache to get stuff into official Debian repos, > but you always can create your own mirror, like it was done here > for D stuff: http://code.google.com/p/d-apt/wiki/APT_Repository . > Packaging itself is always simple and requires close to zero > efforts. > Yea, I'm sure it is a lot simpler if you're primarily targeting just one linux distro and little else. ;) Not simpler for your users, though. :/ > And saying you don't want to learn OS package manager to > distribute stuff for it is like saying you don't want to learn OS > kernel API to write drivers to it. Sure it is so better to be > forced to learn dozens of language-specific package & build > managers to just get a single application working. If you're dealing with a handful of different languages just to write one program, you're already doing it wrong to begin with. (That's the generalized "you", I don't mean you specifically). And even if that weren't the case, how is needing to deal with a variety of different OS-specific package managers just to release one program any better?
