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Comment by monadic3 | Hacker News Reader

What, did curl not work?

"we ran into the issue of distributing the CLI tool to our team of engineers without the need of distributing a new set of tokens or making the binary public"

Seems a neat enough hack to make their newer shit available internally using existing tools/security.

I haven't read the article yet, but I would assume they want versioning, history, checksumming and verification. All that stuff is worthwhile, it's just unfortunate npm is such a heavy dependency to achieve it.

Not that heavy if they're already using it though

It also only gets really bad with deep dependency trees. If it's just your stuff, you probably avoid most of the issues.

Debian apt gives all these things and would be less of a heavy dependency.

If they only needed linux support, that would have worked too

The problem with .deb and .rpm is that their spec file format is horrendous. I've packaged multiple RPMs and every time I have to do it is a complete PITA, lots of quirks, macros, flags, etc.

The official docs are like a deep man page and do not have simple use cases, like, create a pkg for a binary

or create a pkg for a binary with systemd

or how to distribute a pkg of .so

IMO if the .deb and .rpm maintainers invested some time in modernizing their official pages with lots of quick starts and guides it would bring a lot of developers to their side.

(And in this specific case they needed more than Linux support)

...for a single OS that none of the devs might be using.

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