4 ms·

It shouldn't. Users should be using a package manager to manage software. Windows fucked up users expectations by not including a sane one by default... ever. A

It shouldn't. Users should be using a package manager to manage software. Windows fucked up users expectations by not including a sane one by default... ever. And no, Windows Store doesn't count.

oblio 5y ago
> Users should Users should and regular people should: * not smoke * not drink * eat healthy food in moderate amounts * ... "Should" almost never works, especially at scale.
_vdpp 5y ago
Package managers are a necessary evil on systems where installing software scatters a bunch of files all over because of a dogmatic adherence to an obsolete FHS. It’s a huge burden on either the distro maintainers or the developers to produce new packages for already-written software, which often results in outdated or broken releases available in the package repos. And now every language ecosystem has one or more package managers for development libs - pip, conda, cargo, npm, opam, dub, etc. - and then optional package managers like choco, homebrew, and probably some others I missed. It’s a huge mess. So instead we throw up our hands and just bundle everything we need in a container and duplicate the _whole distro_ because the “package” ecosystem is such a disaster. The sane way to handle software installs and uninstalls would have been cp/rm.
- _vdpp 5y ago
  One more addition to my rant here - could we pick even more ridiculous, unintuitive names for package manager binaries? zypper? apt-get? yum? xbps-install? pacman at least kind of reminds you of “package manager”. This isn’t meant to dump all over the hard work that goes into all these. I suppose too that “install” is taken by a command which copies files with certain flags (anyone ever use this?). Every one of these uses different flags too, so for someone who uses a number of different distros it’s a huge pain to remember them and switch back and forth. FreeBSD at least uses the eminently sensible “pkg” command with flags like “search” and “add.”

It shouldn't. Users should be using a package manager to manage software. Windows fucked up users expectations by not including a sane one by default... ever. And no, Windows Store doesn't count.

oblio 5y ago

> Users should Users should and regular people should: * not smoke * not drink * eat healthy food in moderate amounts * ... "Should" almost never works, especially at scale.

_vdpp 5y ago

Package managers are a necessary evil on systems where installing software scatters a bunch of files all over because of a dogmatic adherence to an obsolete FHS. It’s a huge burden on either the distro maintainers or the developers to produce new packages for already-written software, which often results in outdated or broken releases available in the package repos. And now every language ecosystem has one or more package managers for development libs - pip, conda, cargo, npm, opam, dub, etc. - and then optional package managers like choco, homebrew, and probably some others I missed. It’s a huge mess. So instead we throw up our hands and just bundle everything we need in a container and duplicate the _whole distro_ because the “package” ecosystem is such a disaster. The sane way to handle software installs and uninstalls would have been cp/rm.

_vdpp 5y ago
One more addition to my rant here - could we pick even more ridiculous, unintuitive names for package manager binaries? zypper? apt-get? yum? xbps-install? pacman at least kind of reminds you of “package manager”. This isn’t meant to dump all over the hard work that goes into all these. I suppose too that “install” is taken by a command which copies files with certain flags (anyone ever use this?). Every one of these uses different flags too, so for someone who uses a number of different distros it’s a huge pain to remember them and switch back and forth. FreeBSD at least uses the eminently sensible “pkg” command with flags like “search” and “add.”