6 ms·
Yeah well, who's hungry? No really, neither users nor developers care, nor should they. I've been using Linux on the desktop for well over a decade and I'm tir
by mixedCase 6y ago
Yeah well, who's hungry?
No really, neither users nor developers care, nor should they. I've been using Linux on the desktop for well over a decade and I'm tired of seeing this plea for everything to behave exactly like C or scripting languages because every distro wants to be its own special snowflake and it would be too hard to adapt.
The world has changed and distros have to stop pretending it hasn't. Flatpak, Nix, those are better models that reflect our reality where developers don't want to worry about ten thousand different distros with wildly different downstream configurations producing different kinds of bugs, as well as the desire of users of just getting the darned app.
If you're worried about security you must always, first, work with upstream. Upstream should be the party responsible for its users, not you. Upstream not fast enough and you want to go the extra mile? Well then your packaging tool-belt should have support for patching a series of libaries in an automated fashion and rebuilding the dependency tree; and make sure that you return to upstream as soon as possible.
If you want your downstream to diverge from upstream because you want to act as a barrier as the old distros do, then you'll have to accept the fact that you're maintaining a fork and not pretend to upstream that you're distributing their work or that your bug reports are compatible. Otherwise, again, just limit yourself on distributing the latest upstream's stable release with the bare minimum patching necessary for getting things to work with the distro's chosen config.
With some luck, after the Linux community comes to terms with the fact that the distro model must shift, we can begin to finally share some packaging efforts between all distros and we can leave much of the incompatibility bullshit in the past.
Imagine one day everyone just building from shared Nix derivations? Very ironically, it would look a lot like Portage and Gentoo's USE flags but with everyone building off those generic derivations and offering binary caches for them.
- noobermin 6y agoIt's hard not to read this and not feel like a little bit of it is some maintainers worried about losing control. When I get on irc and say the words "pip" they certainly send me those vibes.
- loopz 6y agoIt's just idealism, but no ideology suits everyone and for every context. People forget this.
- progval 6y ago> I'm tired of seeing this plea for everything to behave exactly like C or scripting languages because every distro wants to be its own special snowflake and it would be too hard to adapt. The same argument can be used the other way around: "I'm tired of seeing this plea for everything to behave exactly like Docker or static .exe because every software wants to be its own special snowflake and it would be too hard to adapt to software distributions."
- folkrav 6y agoThis is quite literally the exact opposite of software wanting to be its own special snowflake, so not sure spinning the argument around really works.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]