Hacker News Reader

> 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).

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com