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It seems nowadays people just upvote based on just the title. This is a switch statement wrapper around package managers, on the front-page of HN.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
phoe-krk 8y ago
If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.
- sneak 8y ago
  It doesn’t work. Different distributions and OSes use different names for packages.
  - anothergoogler 8y ago
    It also swallows command-line options.
  - RayDonnelly 8y ago
    Packages installed from different distros will conflict all over the place, this is silly, please don't add conda despite my other comment!
askmike 8y ago
It's not always about the complexity of the solution. This is a great example of something annoying a lot of people here can identify with (myself included). I'd say this annoys a lot of people whose job it is to automate things, and this is the first proposed solution I see. Who cares it's a hacked together small program with if statements? It's not any less interesting than a proposal for a new standard in a 50 page PDF document to me.
- therein 8y ago
  (1) There are many flags to these commands that you will need to know on a per platform basis anyway. (2) Package names aren't always identical across platforms, at least not enough that you can rely on that. It is a low-cost attempt to solve a problem that in my opinion doesn't really exist and it doesn't even do a great job doing that due to the points above. For instance if you want to use pacman without knowing what -Ss stands for, at the slightest conflict, you'll be going back to using pacman without this wrapper. Perhaps people who need to have package managers abstracted away could be a good target for Docker. Maybe a web UI to dynamically bake a docker image with required packages.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (or bad, in this case). The fact that everything is different makes it a problem worth solving. Docker just abstracts the problem.
  - askmike 8y ago
    Yes, abstractions do leak sometimes. I'm not saying I'm running this on all my production servers right now. For me the problem this tool solves is real (although not big), and I'm interested to see what other people think of both the problem and the solution. That's why I upvoted it, I guess other people had similar ideas.
    - nsomaru 8y ago
      What problem does it solve? Just use the package manager provided by the platform...right? Especially given the problem of package naming, it’s different even between Debian and Ubuntu :/
      - askmike 8y ago
        > Especially given the problem of package naming I haven't encountered this for all the standard applications I end up installing on my machines (things like htop, nginx, etc). > What problem does it solve? It solves the problem of me having to think about what OS I am on before I can install something (and if it's something I don't use a lot I might need to google the package manager syntax).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

phoe-krk 8y ago

If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

sneak 8y ago
It doesn’t work. Different distributions and OSes use different names for packages.
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  It also swallows command-line options.
- RayDonnelly 8y ago
  Packages installed from different distros will conflict all over the place, this is silly, please don't add conda despite my other comment!

askmike 8y ago

It's not always about the complexity of the solution. This is a great example of something annoying a lot of people here can identify with (myself included). I'd say this annoys a lot of people whose job it is to automate things, and this is the first proposed solution I see. Who cares it's a hacked together small program with if statements? It's not any less interesting than a proposal for a new standard in a 50 page PDF document to me.

therein 8y ago
(1) There are many flags to these commands that you will need to know on a per platform basis anyway. (2) Package names aren't always identical across platforms, at least not enough that you can rely on that. It is a low-cost attempt to solve a problem that in my opinion doesn't really exist and it doesn't even do a great job doing that due to the points above. For instance if you want to use pacman without knowing what -Ss stands for, at the slightest conflict, you'll be going back to using pacman without this wrapper. Perhaps people who need to have package managers abstracted away could be a good target for Docker. Maybe a web UI to dynamically bake a docker image with required packages.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (or bad, in this case). The fact that everything is different makes it a problem worth solving. Docker just abstracts the problem.
- askmike 8y ago
  Yes, abstractions do leak sometimes. I'm not saying I'm running this on all my production servers right now. For me the problem this tool solves is real (although not big), and I'm interested to see what other people think of both the problem and the solution. That's why I upvoted it, I guess other people had similar ideas.
  - nsomaru 8y ago
    What problem does it solve? Just use the package manager provided by the platform...right? Especially given the problem of package naming, it’s different even between Debian and Ubuntu :/
    - askmike 8y ago
      > Especially given the problem of package naming I haven't encountered this for all the standard applications I end up installing on my machines (things like htop, nginx, etc). > What problem does it solve? It solves the problem of me having to think about what OS I am on before I can install something (and if it's something I don't use a lot I might need to google the package manager syntax).