Yet another article arguing against distribution package managers without understanding them a bit. Traditional packaging is perfectly suitable for modern appl

Yet another article arguing against distribution package managers without understanding them a bit. Traditional packaging is perfectly suitable for modern applications. What author is arguing against is the distributions' packaging policies. Distribution policies are what prevents shipping multiple versions of the same library or program, not package managers. These policies are in place because they're necessary for releasing and maintaining a 50000 package distribution. But for shipping your own software you're free to ignore distribution policies. Package managers have always provided the necessary mechanism. Nothing is preventing you from shoving in all library, binary or data dependencies your program needs into a deb package. You're also free to embed version number in package name and installation paths so different versions could be installed in parallel. The package manager will obey dutifully. Build systems have always been capable of installing libraries into arbitrary paths, and deb/rpm packages are just dumb archive files with metadata slapped on top. If you shove everything needed into it and declare no dependencies, it'll be no different than a dumb tar file and it'll work just fine if you did it right. You can even imitate flatpak runtimes if you want. Put same things a flatpak runtime has into /usr/lib/freedesktop-sdk-21.08 into a package like freedesktop-sdk-2108.deb, and make your application deb depend on freedesktop-sdk-2108 and you're good to go. I'm really tired hearing of these baseless arguments over and over over the years. I just wish everyone could be honest and just say "We don't like deb/rpm, they're not cool, they're not hip, we just want to NIH them" so we could be spared of these made up justifications. P.S. I have nothing against nix. Nix is legit innovation.