It seems nowadays people just upvote based on just the title. This is a switch statement wrapper around package managers, on the front-page of HN.
Who cares it's a hacked together small program with if statements? It's not any less interesting than a proposal for a new standard in a 50 page PDF document to me.
(2) Package names aren't always identical across platforms, at least not enough that you can rely on that.
It is a low-cost attempt to solve a problem that in my opinion doesn't really exist and it doesn't even do a great job doing that due to the points above.
For instance if you want to use pacman without knowing what -Ss stands for, at the slightest conflict, you'll be going back to using pacman without this wrapper.
Perhaps people who need to have package managers abstracted away could be a good target for Docker. Maybe a web UI to dynamically bake a docker image with required packages.
When I need to do package management, I'll use a package manager. But for when I need to quickly install one tool to get something done, my giant shell function "ji" (stands for "just install") has saved me precious time.
In its current state, this project is equivalent to a bunch of command alises, but that doesn't mean it can't be useful.
For me the problem this tool solves is real (although not big), and I'm interested to see what other people think of both the problem and the solution. That's why I upvoted it, I guess other people had similar ideas.
I haven't encountered this for all the standard applications I end up installing on my machines (things like htop, nginx, etc).
> What problem does it solve?
It solves the problem of me having to think about what OS I am on before I can install something (and if it's something I don't use a lot I might need to google the package manager syntax).
The fact that everything is different makes it a problem worth solving. Docker just abstracts the problem.
If your job is to automate things and you're not using containers, then you're doing it wrong.