> [Distro-specific build systems are] probably the biggest barrier to me shipping software on Linux. Don’t[1]. Ship source tarballs (or VCS tags). I’ll grant

> [Distro-specific build systems are] probably the biggest barrier to me shipping software on Linux. Don’t[1]. Ship source tarballs (or VCS tags). I’ll grant that most distros’ build systems are antiquated and, in places, silly. (That includes Nixpkgs, first released 2006.) We could really use some fresh ideas there. But they’re also not for you (or me) in your (or my) capacity as a software author. They’re there for a person who works on packaging software for, most of the time, a single distro, and their balance of complexity and flexibility is calibrated accordingly. One of the functions of that person is also to keep you honest and represent the interests of users before you, because they have more expertise than the users but not as much of an attachment to your software as you. The ecosystem is less healthy when the author tries to fill in for the packager. “But then the users will come to my bugtracker to complain about bugs in patched versions!” Pre-Google, we used to have a solution for that: a configure option to set the bug reporting email, present in all GNU software. Nowadays it’s not clear what a good solution could be, but it does seem like, unfortunately, the author will have to maintain a table of packager contact information for the end users. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....