On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:17:05 +0100 "Dicebot" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Monday, 18 February 2013 at 14:14:30 UTC, Dicebot wrote: > > ... > tl; dr: Care not about developer, he can adjust. Care about > end-user who has single OS and is forced to deal with miriads of > different package systems First of all, I *am* thinking about the end-user. OS-based package managers frequently *do* suck for the end-user: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html Look at all that idiotic bullshit the users have to deal with just for something that *could* have been a trivial download/extract/run (Or an even simpler "wget ... -O fetch-and-build.sh && ./fetch-and-build.sh"). And that page is *just* for Debian/Ubuntu. And then there's stuff like this which isn't much better: http://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php?section=downloads Secondly, where do you get that crazy idea that all end-users only ever have one OS to deal with? ATM, I've got a couple windows machines, a kubuntu desktop (old), and a debian 6 server. And that's not counting VMs. Other people have even more than that, and it doesn't help anyone to have a totally different set of instructions for doing the same damn thing each one. *I* can install any version of DMD I want on any of my systems by doing this: dvm install 2.0xx Same damn task, same damn command, character-for-character, on freaking everything. You're seriously going to try to tell me that's *worse* for me than having to do it totally different on each system? And finally, there's two types of users here, lib users and app users: Libs: If they're interested in your lib, then they're already familiar with the language's package manager. Apps: If your user has to deal directly with any of the language-based packager managers involved, then your buildscript sucks. But that's just for actually compiling. If your user has to deal with any language's package manager merely to *run* your app, then, well again, then you're doing something wrong. (Such as maybe using Python: I'll agree that Gem is fucking shit - more than half the times I've tried to install something it would just vomit out a Traceback.) Language-based package managers are a developer thing, not an end-user thing. Even if your app is using a language-based packager manager, that doesn't mean the end-user even needs to touch it directly. >or, even better, binary bloat of > programs that try to ship every single dependency with it. Right, binary bloat in this >1GB HDD age is sooo much worse than running into unexpected version incompatibilities and conflicts.
