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Curious to hear more about language-specific (though OS-agnostic!) package management systems. IMO composer is the best thing ever happened to PHP, Ruby gems ar

by pestaa 12y ago

Curious to hear more about language-specific (though OS-agnostic!) package management systems. IMO composer is the best thing ever happened to PHP, Ruby gems are huge, Python eggs also make a very useful ecosystem. OpenSUSE's Open Build System would be great to ship independent packages, but those are again heavily tied to Unices, hence leaving other platforms behind.

JoshTriplett 12y ago
> Curious to hear more about language-specific (though OS-agnostic!) package management systems. As far as I can tell, one of the main justifications for most language package management systems is "we also run on Windows/OSX, which has no package management, so we'll invent our own". As a result, users of systems that do have sane package management get stuck with multiple package management systems, one for the distro and one for every language. Even then, I find it disappointing that nobody has built a cross-platform package management system for arbitrary languages to unify those efforts.
- kungfooguru 12y ago
  The problem with language package management systems is they've been used for installing user facing software. As a developer tool I think it is the perfect way to go. And you should add Linux to your Windows/OSX as being an issue, which Linux package management tool would you build packages for? All of them? The end user package management provided by the OS should be for installing end user packages and the language tool for installing and publishing libraries and dev tools.
  - wycats 12y ago
    > The problem with language package management systems is they've been used for installing user facing software. As a developer tool I think it is the perfect way to go. Precisely so.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  The other justification is generally a clash of cultures: the people who maintain distro/OS package managers generally come out of the culture of sysadmins, who value stability over feature-richness, while the people working the language communities generally come out of the culture of developers, whose priorities are the exact opposite. When languages try to hook into existing OS-level systems, the people on the language end get frustrated by the way the people on the package-manager end don't hurry to rush out bleeding-edge versions of packages the second they hit Github. To the package-manager people, that's no big deal, their orientation towards stability and predictability makes them comfortable with waiting a little for the coffee to cool. But to the developers, who want to get their hands on the Latest and Greatest Right Now!, it feels like slogging though molasses. So the developers eventually end up blowing their stacks and stomping off yelling "Yeah? Well fine, we'll build our own package manager then! With blackjack! And hookers!"
  - DennisP 12y ago
    Maybe OS-level package managers should default to stable, but let the user check a box to get the latest and greatest. Developers want a stable system like everyone else, but for the stuff we're hacking on, we have a legitimate need to get the most recent, so our software isn't obsolete by the time we finish it.
    - djur 12y ago
      Most OS-level package managers also aren't designed to install more than one version of a package at a time. They don't tend to integrate with build systems as well, either.
    - yxhuvud 12y ago
      I'd be happy enough if the OS-level packagers stopped modifying the package-level packages they packaged.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      That's not so simple. A distro is a fine-tuned collections of packages which work more or less well together. Debian, for instance, comes in stable/testing/unstable/experimental flavours, depending on how daring you are. But even this isn't a universal solution. If you are deploying for instance a web application, you will want to deploy a locked down number of dependencies as well, regardless of what is present on the target system. And you may need deploy multiple applications side by side. Few system package managers have an answer to this.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > As a result, users of systems that do have sane package management Given the diversity of OS in the IT landscape, which systems are those?
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    I met only one package manager that I don't need to fight in order to get what I want: Gentoo's Portage. With a local overlay and language specific functionality concentrated in eclasses it's trivial to add new packages, do version bumps, have fine grained control over installed versions, enabled features, etc.
- kryptiskt 12y ago
  The distro only contains a small selection of the packages (even if there are hundreds or thousands of them) and the language package system is usually the source the distro maintainers use to find the packages anyway.
- kazagistar 12y ago
  Most of the unix package management systems are not really that good for development: they don't support sandboxing, or non-root installation/execution, or don't support the right kind of versioning, or don't support multiple versions of a library, or some other issue. The only existing system that I might trust enough for this kind of thing Nix, and at least for Haskell it is a pretty solid alternative to their language-standard package manager. Unfortunately, its popularity is way lower then stuff like apt or yum which are pretty shitty for development compared to something like pip or cabal.
yla92 12y ago
Lately, IMHO, Gradle in Android Development(applicable for Java development as well) is a huge improvement over managing dependencies with pom.xml(ant) and linking jar files manually. Besides, you can totally customize build.gralde too.

by pestaa 12y ago

JoshTriplett 12y ago

> Curious to hear more about language-specific (though OS-agnostic!) package management systems. As far as I can tell, one of the main justifications for most language package management systems is "we also run on Windows/OSX, which has no package management, so we'll invent our own". As a result, users of systems that do have sane package management get stuck with multiple package management systems, one for the distro and one for every language. Even then, I find it disappointing that nobody has built a cross-platform package management system for arbitrary languages to unify those efforts.

kungfooguru 12y ago
The problem with language package management systems is they've been used for installing user facing software. As a developer tool I think it is the perfect way to go. And you should add Linux to your Windows/OSX as being an issue, which Linux package management tool would you build packages for? All of them? The end user package management provided by the OS should be for installing end user packages and the language tool for installing and publishing libraries and dev tools.
- wycats 12y ago
  > The problem with language package management systems is they've been used for installing user facing software. As a developer tool I think it is the perfect way to go. Precisely so.
smacktoward 12y ago
The other justification is generally a clash of cultures: the people who maintain distro/OS package managers generally come out of the culture of sysadmins, who value stability over feature-richness, while the people working the language communities generally come out of the culture of developers, whose priorities are the exact opposite. When languages try to hook into existing OS-level systems, the people on the language end get frustrated by the way the people on the package-manager end don't hurry to rush out bleeding-edge versions of packages the second they hit Github. To the package-manager people, that's no big deal, their orientation towards stability and predictability makes them comfortable with waiting a little for the coffee to cool. But to the developers, who want to get their hands on the Latest and Greatest Right Now!, it feels like slogging though molasses. So the developers eventually end up blowing their stacks and stomping off yelling "Yeah? Well fine, we'll build our own package manager then! With blackjack! And hookers!"
- DennisP 12y ago
  Maybe OS-level package managers should default to stable, but let the user check a box to get the latest and greatest. Developers want a stable system like everyone else, but for the stuff we're hacking on, we have a legitimate need to get the most recent, so our software isn't obsolete by the time we finish it.
  - djur 12y ago
    Most OS-level package managers also aren't designed to install more than one version of a package at a time. They don't tend to integrate with build systems as well, either.
  - yxhuvud 12y ago
    I'd be happy enough if the OS-level packagers stopped modifying the package-level packages they packaged.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    That's not so simple. A distro is a fine-tuned collections of packages which work more or less well together. Debian, for instance, comes in stable/testing/unstable/experimental flavours, depending on how daring you are. But even this isn't a universal solution. If you are deploying for instance a web application, you will want to deploy a locked down number of dependencies as well, regardless of what is present on the target system. And you may need deploy multiple applications side by side. Few system package managers have an answer to this.
pjmlp 12y ago
> As a result, users of systems that do have sane package management Given the diversity of OS in the IT landscape, which systems are those?
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  I met only one package manager that I don't need to fight in order to get what I want: Gentoo's Portage. With a local overlay and language specific functionality concentrated in eclasses it's trivial to add new packages, do version bumps, have fine grained control over installed versions, enabled features, etc.
kryptiskt 12y ago
The distro only contains a small selection of the packages (even if there are hundreds or thousands of them) and the language package system is usually the source the distro maintainers use to find the packages anyway.
kazagistar 12y ago
Most of the unix package management systems are not really that good for development: they don't support sandboxing, or non-root installation/execution, or don't support the right kind of versioning, or don't support multiple versions of a library, or some other issue. The only existing system that I might trust enough for this kind of thing Nix, and at least for Haskell it is a pretty solid alternative to their language-standard package manager. Unfortunately, its popularity is way lower then stuff like apt or yum which are pretty shitty for development compared to something like pip or cabal.

yla92 12y ago

Lately, IMHO, Gradle in Android Development(applicable for Java development as well) is a huge improvement over managing dependencies with pom.xml(ant) and linking jar files manually. Besides, you can totally customize build.gralde too.