Hacker News Reader

Comment by uecker | Hacker News Reader

The problem of packages not being packaged is not solved by more packaging systems.

The problem of libraries not being packaged is solved by distro-agnostic packaging systems. Why do you think everyone uses PyPI, Cargo, Go modules, NPM, etc. instead of this insane "package your app and all of its dependencies for every distro" idea? Pure lunacy.

It is not difficult to package for the most important distro (the others usually import from them). Those distro-agnostic packaging systems are popular because they basically have no quality control at all, so it is basically no effort to package for them, just register a github repository somewhere. But this is also why they are full of garbage and have severe supply chain issues.

> But this is also why they are full of garbage and have severe supply chain issues.

I don't think the solution to supply chain problems is "just make supplying things so shitty and annoying that nobody will bother". Not a good one anyway.

I do not think packaging for a distribution is annoying. If you do not bother because you do not want to match some minimal community standards, maybe your software should no be packaged? And if you think the tooling can be improved, then why not invest there? But this does not justify the existence alternate packing systems.

It's part of my job to ship software on Linux, and if anything the part making things "shitty and annoying" is when we have to deal with people/'suppliers' (exclusively) using "foreign" packaging methods.

We had 2 dependencies like that; one we talked to the creators about and helped them ship distro packages, the other we just got rid of. Life is nice now.

sure, it is solved just by one with good packages coverage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com