Looks like it's time to run educational campaigns on how to package code for distros, the most sane setups I've seen use their own apt or yum repos to ensure that packages are always at the right version.
This is becoming a huge issue with JavaScript libraries and npm where most maintainers don't give a fig about backwards compatibility or backporting. On Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 1:28 PM Miles Fidelman <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks, > > I've recently found myself looking for a new distro for our production > servers, and I've noticed something that seems just a bit disturbing: > > It seems like documentation of how to install and manage unpackaged > software seems to have almost disappeared - i.e., it seems like awful > lot of distros seem to assume that EVERYTHING is packaged. > > At least in my experience, the reverse is more common: > > - developers tend to distribute source, built in their language-specific > development environment, "packaged" for cross-platform building (e.g., a > .tar file created using gnu autotools), or a .jar file, or what have you > > - it's pretty rare for developers to package for more than a few, > particularly popular distros (if they package at all). > > - when building production servers, it's a lot more reliable to > "./config; make; make install" than to rely on packages for anything other > than utilities and platform stuff > > - an awful lot of stuff uses its own dependency resolution mechanisms > and repositories (e.g., perl w/ cpan) > > Somehow, this seems broken, and getting worse. I've noticed this when it > comes to systemd (our production systems rely on several applications that > come with sysvinit scripts, but no other form of startup scripts. Until > now, > we've been using Debian, and all works just fine - looks like I'll have > to do a lot of tweaking for the next platform upgrade - which is what > is motivating my looking around). But, what with the emergence of several > new platforms (e.g., SmartOS), it strikes me that the approach of > distributing auto-configuring source, looks a lot less brittle than > an assumption that someone is going to package everything, for every > platform. > > Not sure what can be done, or by whom, but seems like an issue worth > raising. > > Comments, thoughts? > > Miles Fidelman > > > > > -- > In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. > In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra > > > > >
