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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
by _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the distro maintainers or the developers to produce new packages for already-written software, which often results in outdated or broken releases available in the package repos.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 agoOne 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.”