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script language development is not a great example for packaging patterns when you compare to the OS itself. what is the constructive way forward? treat scrip

• josephg 3y ago
  What does “script language development” mean? Despite the name, I’m not using JavaScript to write scripts. I’m largely writing networked server applications - which are very much a systems problem. And rust is very much not a scripting language but it’s in exactly the same boat. Actually it’s probably worse because async and http support isn’t built in to rust’s standard library. A simple hello world web server with tokio and serde will probably have on the order of 40 dependencies in the dependency tree, not to mention rustc and cargo. How many of them do you think are in apt? Maybe none since, contra Debian’s policy, the final build result is statically linked anyway. The rust compiler doesn’t support dynamic linking of rust dependencies. The reality is that apt simply doesn’t provide a stable, useful, modern software development ecosystem. The task of providing a “stable” version of rustc or nodejs is these days the responsibility of the rust and nodejs projects - which both have CI with incredible testing infrastructure. And the effect of that is that the latest stable versions are going to work more reliably to run real JavaScript and rust programs than whatever crusty version Debian ships. And that disharmony between what Debian wants and what developers want causes real problems when shipping software to end users, and when deploying software to servers.