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Comment by northisup | Hacker News Reader

Don't we already had an app store for servers called apt-get?

People laughed at Dropbox because Coda/rsync/Subversion already existed.

apt-get works for system libraries but not really that well for high-level apps which have different requirements and release schedules, specially the less mainstream ones. We also support Windows and OS X, which do not have anything like apt-get. In those cases we use regular installers or the OS X App Store

Say what? Isn't Firefox a high-level application? What about LibreOffice? Or Apache HTTPD?

Isn't the distro maintainers the ones who define the release schedules? Doesn't Fedora or SuSE, for example, release the newest versions for Firefox, KDE to the latest on their current distro for example?

I think an Application Store for servers is something redundant, re-engineering the wheel.

But that's my 2¢.

EDIT: And I'm even talking about similar tools to tasksel.

Firefox and LibreOffice are desktop apps. Apache is a server. We are talking about server apps, in particular web applications. Anybody who has had to install a non-trivial Rails application like Gitlab, Discourse or Redmine, knows that pain.

What happens if the distro maintainers are not doing a good job and keep lagging behind? Shouldn't developers themselves be able to take charge of the situation?

They already can if they want to produce packages. This sounds like it may make that easier.

I'd still prefer to use the ones built and maintained by the distro though.

Imagine that you don't know how to use a command line, then look again.

So ... synaptic?

I know, there are likely use-cases not addressed by these tools that others can fulfill, but Synaptic does work as Graphical apt/aptitude

VNCing into a full GUI on a server just to run Synaptic seems like a waste, although I guess Windows admins do the equivalent. But as ridruejo said, most Web apps still require significant and often arcane configuration after you've gotten everything installed. (Arguably this is the app's problem to solve...)

In many cases it is not even the configuration of the application itself, which tends to be complex in general, but getting all the third-party dependencies (libraries, gems, servers, etc.) that is the pain, specially if the latest versions of any component is required. This tends not to be an issue for well known apps like WordPress, but it is for the less mainstream ones...

Wait so... command line is bad and when I suggest you don't have to use that, a GUI program is also bad? What answer were you looking for there?

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