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And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M ma
by mbreese 7y ago
And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures?
Sure, some install scripts will be quite simple, but in that case, why do you need to have the install script in the first place? You'd only need it if the installation procedure was too complicated for an `INSTALL` or `README` document.
- dmitriid 7y ago> And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures? Surprisingly, yes. Especially for *nix systems where a lot of things (but not package managers) are more-or-less unified. The author may not have the time or desire to learn the half-a-dozen or so package managers and set up a build system to create packages for all of those, and then do the work of getting them into the standard repositories.
- notabee 7y agoWell I guess if that's too much trouble, then why write documentation either? That's extra work and people could just read the code. And so on. Ultimately, the effort put in to proper distribution reflects on the maturity of the project. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping users from submitting things like rpm specs upstream either if they're requested.
- dmitriid 7y ago> Well I guess if that's too much trouble, then why write documentation either? Bad guess. > Ultimately, the effort put in to proper distribution reflects on the maturity of the project For some, maybe. Even though there maturity of the project is reflected by how timely three bugs are fixed, quality of docs, size of community, development of new features.