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System package managers conflate the stuff that is needed to run the system and what the developer builds with. They do badly in handling several different vers

System package managers conflate the stuff that is needed to run the system and what the developer builds with. They do badly in handling several different versions of libraries, they add latency of up to two years and only a subset of the packages are available. And when you are done you have to uninstall all the crap you installed instead of just blowing away the virtualenv (or whatever mechanism the language has).

microcolonel 12y ago
Of course, you don't actually need to uninstall all the crap, because when you install it only once on the system, you don't need to build thirty virtualenvs with roughly the same packages. Also, choosing system package archives is simple. If you want two-ish years of stabilization for a feature release, and you want bugfixes for two or three years or longer, you can go with Debian. If you pull most things off of head anyway then go with Arch. Of course, you're entitled to liking egocentric dependency resolution(or no dependency resolution at all, as practised by most), and I'm not going to stop you. But it really is very convenient and robust to handle high-level language libraries in a system package manager, it helps immensely when you intend to actually ship a piece of software rather than fapping off a script that some poor sap will need to update to patch five-year-old known remote vulnerabilities.