4 ms·

You should point the finger at package managers. They never really addressed needs outside of system administration (to be fair, that's the problem they were tr

by pfranz 5y ago

You should point the finger at package managers. They never really addressed needs outside of system administration (to be fair, that's the problem they were trying to solve). Scripting languages came up with their own package system because package managers didn't fit their needs, I often found myself building from source and installing into my homedir because package managers wouldn't accommodate, industries (like the one I work in) came up with their own package management outside of the OS. Nix/Guix seems like the only one that's trying something different enough to address some of those other use-cases, but the cat's out of the bag for most people.

southerntofu 5y ago
> Nix/Guix seems like the only one that's trying something different enough to address some of those other use-cases, but the cat's out of the bag for most people. Maybe that's because nix and guix don't interop despite having rather similar principles, and because we mostly don't have GUI for it (like GNOME Software has integration for flatpak) nor desktop integration (like AppImageLauncher). Are you aware of work being done in this space?
- pfranz 5y ago
  I wasn't trying to undermine their hard work! I think both have a chance of being successful in their own domains. I only meant to call them out as exceptions. All I was saying is that if a new package manager addresses all of the issues scripting languages had, scripting languages would still use their own package managers. Because the culture is now set, even new scripting languages would write their own package managers.
- SteveBash 5y ago
  There's nix-gui: https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
cycomanic 5y ago
>You should point the finger at package managers. They never really addressed needs outside of system administration (to be fair, that's the problem they were trying to solve). Scripting languages came up with their own package system because package managers didn't fit their needs I argue that's simply not true. Scripting languages came up with package managers because the largest platform (Windows) does not have a package manager. Actually that scripting languages implement package managers is a very good argument that their functionality is desired. As a side note, every language package manager is much worse in my experience than all of the system package managers I ever used.
- pfranz 5y ago
  Right. Windows support is a feature outside of the scope of Linux package managers. If they weren't tethered to specific distros I don't see why one couldn't support multiple platforms. It hasn't historically, but Windows has a bunch of package managers, even one supported by Microsoft. I think "largest" is quite an exaggeration since historically scripting languages packaging has been rather terrible on Windows. While Windows was a consideration for languages like Python (I've read they avoided Make because of Windows), for me cygwin always coming up along with it until recently.

by pfranz 5y ago

southerntofu 5y ago

> Nix/Guix seems like the only one that's trying something different enough to address some of those other use-cases, but the cat's out of the bag for most people. Maybe that's because nix and guix don't interop despite having rather similar principles, and because we mostly don't have GUI for it (like GNOME Software has integration for flatpak) nor desktop integration (like AppImageLauncher). Are you aware of work being done in this space?

pfranz 5y ago
I wasn't trying to undermine their hard work! I think both have a chance of being successful in their own domains. I only meant to call them out as exceptions. All I was saying is that if a new package manager addresses all of the issues scripting languages had, scripting languages would still use their own package managers. Because the culture is now set, even new scripting languages would write their own package managers.
SteveBash 5y ago
There's nix-gui: https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui

cycomanic 5y ago

>You should point the finger at package managers. They never really addressed needs outside of system administration (to be fair, that's the problem they were trying to solve). Scripting languages came up with their own package system because package managers didn't fit their needs I argue that's simply not true. Scripting languages came up with package managers because the largest platform (Windows) does not have a package manager. Actually that scripting languages implement package managers is a very good argument that their functionality is desired. As a side note, every language package manager is much worse in my experience than all of the system package managers I ever used.

pfranz 5y ago
Right. Windows support is a feature outside of the scope of Linux package managers. If they weren't tethered to specific distros I don't see why one couldn't support multiple platforms. It hasn't historically, but Windows has a bunch of package managers, even one supported by Microsoft. I think "largest" is quite an exaggeration since historically scripting languages packaging has been rather terrible on Windows. While Windows was a consideration for languages like Python (I've read they avoided Make because of Windows), for me cygwin always coming up along with it until recently.