On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 09:21:05 AM -0400, George N. White III wrote:
Open source makes it easy for people to innovate, and we need to
encourage experimentation, but we can't have experiments in linux
distros.
George,
the core of that post of mine is that what you say has become
impossible. That is, it has become IMPOSSIBLE, for users with more
than really basic needs, who still are many more than developers
buthave other ways to serve the community, to NOT "experiment",
wasting against their will much more time than it was the case 10
years ago, whatever distro they choose.
https://stop.zona-m.net/2022/01/the-sorry-sorry-state-of-linux-packaging/
CPAN, CTAN, CRAN etc. exist because they support multiple OS's.
Whatever. The reality still is that they and their equivalents for
other languages have made it impossible for anyone on any OS to have a
unified front end for package management. And this is not progress wrt
10/15 years ago, no matter how one puts it.
Packages are messy and likely always will be.
Packages are MUCH messier now than before, without any real reason I
can recognize as such, and for users this is NOT progress, that's my
whole point. And I am not talking newbies. I used to compile from
sources tens of packages, back in the 90's/early 00s.
Today, I am forced to spend MORE time than back then to restore a
system that does what I need every time I upgrade the distro, because:
a) compiling everything from source would be consume even more time,
much more than when "config, make, make install" and manual dependency
solving was enough
b) so the least worst way to cope is to endure (every time with
different, often undocumented gotchas) ten different packaging
systems who couldn't care less to acknowledge that people could
need sw from different communities
Sure, software becomes more complex over time. But this doesn't mean
that what we have today makes sense.
Marco
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