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> Packaging it for a distro is someone else's job, and they'll take care of concerns like Debian's dependency policy. If they want to package it in the first place of course.

Yup, this is why I think so many people feel so much friction about it. On Windows and macOS, the developer is usually responsible for the entire thing, even shipping installers for users. Linux distributions tend to split the roles, and as mentioned, once you provide sources and how to build it, you're basically done and it's up to others now.

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That sounds like you could have a situation where the developer wants me to run the app, and I want to run the app, but nobody at the distro I use has packaged up the app, so we're blocked.

> but nobody at the distro I use has packaged up the app

But you're "at the distro", and you want to use it, so you package it :) You might want to be nice to others too, so you make that public. Eventually, the community might end up relying on it, and the package gets an official maintainer from the distribution itself.

So, manually configuring and updating software is complicated and a waste of time. (I'm not even mentioning the stupid thing called "installation and uninstallation".) With package managers, we have displaced this complicated waste of time so that the responsibility for it becomes vague, and as a result sometimes you can't have a nice thing.

> and as a result sometimes you can't have a nice thing.

I've been able to have all the nice things I've wanted, but I also sit down and learn the distributions I use, including how to package stuff, so I can do that myself for things I want to use :)

Some distributions like Arch makes this "self-packaging" extremely easy and simple, and today with LLMs I'm guessing you can get the agent to package most standard software people ship today in under 5 minutes into something acceptable for your own use.

Then you can be the one who'll package it for your distro.

Sorry, I don't have those skills, or any spare time.

And if you want a system whereby software only gets made available if distro-providers care enough, then that's fine. But you're putting a filter between the software producer and non-technical users, and you should be aware that this is a choice you're making.

It has worked for decades and many thousands of packages just fine.

If nobody cares enough to make the application available, perhaps it just shouldn't be there.

> It has worked for decades and many thousands of packages just fine

And yet insane quantities of programs used by millions are only available via raw .deb file downloads, or random alternative PPAs, or via programming language package managers.

The distro maintainer system is impressive, and I’m thankful for it. But saying “it has worked for lots of packages” says nothing about the many it has not worked for.

You still need the distro maintainers to cooperate. And the packaging itself can be highly involved (as in the case of rust dependencies on Debian)

Of course you do, that's where the value comes from after all.

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