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Comment by askmike | Hacker News Reader

Yes, abstractions do leak sometimes. I'm not saying I'm running this on all my production servers right now.

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.

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What problem does it solve? Just use the package manager provided by the platform...right? Especially given the problem of package naming, it’s different even between Debian and Ubuntu :/

> Especially given the problem of package naming

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).

How common is this? I use 2.5 different package managers day-to-day (homebrew/pacman/pakku) and a few more occasionally (portage/pkg/apt). I can't really think of a situation where I had to really think about what I was running to install something. I'd imagine a scenario in which you're often dropped into a box you don't usually interact with would typically also come with a more homogenous environment as far as operating systems go.

It's not very common for me. I maintain a few boxes at different hosting providers for different projects that have been running for a long time. Sometimes I ssh in and update everything. Right now I have to google everytime I ssh into a centos box because I keep forgetting the yum syntax.

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