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Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone notice? We now have 5 different ways to install this package.

These appear to be same packaging format but different installers. Not uncommon these days.

I am a junior developer writing a side project in Golang which probably no one on the internet sees, and there are 3 ways to install it already.

1. Compiled executable

2. Language package manager (go install)

3. Docker image (super trivial to create a distroless docker image).

Same can be said of many python tools (pip, pipx, docker image, homebrew or whatever)

It's not that we are doing more work. It's just that we have more tools these days. :)

I want to complain but this richness in developer availability to implement the same thing many times is why we get a linter that’s 100x faster or a webpack alternative that’s 50x faster.

So, which one of those five options is the simple download?

I’d go with pnpm

So? You don’t have to use, or even know all five.

Sure, but if you don't know what all the ways are you'll be prone to "just follow instructions" and you may not notice that a few years apart your followed instructions regarding different ways of installing or uninstalling things and now your system is a mess

I can't fathom why you would argue availability is bad. You're right about keeping things implicit for devs, but if all five work I don't see an issue

Becoming aware of different ways to do things costs time (to read about it and form opinions on things like which ones are/might be useful to you) and space (in your brain to remember these options and opinions). It's not necessarily bad, but it's a cost.

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