Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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> If you create unnecessary, reducible complexity, then add even more complexity on top of that to manage it, you're doing it wrong.

I believe the fact nobody has been able to reduce the "reducible" complexity you point out for the past 40 years is telling. And no, the NeXT .app folder thing does not reduce it - it replaces the shared library "problem" with other problems (security and just plain malfunction) through obsolete duplicate libraries that may or may not get updated by someone other than the packager.

> First of all, note what you said: every developer.

I'm sorry, but I don't think BeOS was ever aimed at someone other than developers. It would be quite surprising if Haiku were aimed at a different public.

Again, I fail to see your problem with package management. My mother uses a Linux machine and the only contact with package managers she has is the auto-update feature - and her machine is working for 4 straight years without a full reinstall, which is more than most other OSs can say about machines that are not actively managed by someone knowledgeable. I manage dozens of Linux machines and I never experienced the package management disasters you describe.

Maybe you should get some first hand experience and, dare I say, read the manual. If you experience a significantly larger number of disasters than your peers, the problem is most likely not the tooling.

So you're saying that Mac OS, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS are all broken? And Linux's software distribution mechanism is working for end users?

> I'm sorry, but I don't think BeOS was ever aimed at someone other than developers. It would be quite surprising if Haiku were aimed at a different public.

The involvement of former Apple employees, targeting Macs, the attempted sale to Apple, the single-user OS, the UI riffing off MacOS, the focus on media, the simple UI -- those we're all flukes? It was actually meant to be a difficult to use Linux clone that focused on shipping packaged UNIX software, despite its particularly weak posix compatibility and complete non-standard directory layout?

I was hacking on BeOS since DR2. I have friends who worked there. It was contemporary with my career, and I was following Apple's and Be's parallel efforts closely. It was, as far as my knowledge and experience goes, a user-focused operating system ala MacOS.

> Maybe you should get some first hand experience and, dare I say, read the manual. If you experience a significantly larger number of disasters than your peers, the problem is most likely not the tooling.

Many years ago, I wrote one one of the package managers in wide use today. Then I spent years shipping software for multiple platforms. I think I understand the trade-offs, and implementing package management only made the underlying failure of the Linux package manager model more clear.

What kind of ridiculous system requires an army of volunteers to maintain a graph of dependencies in lockstep, making it nearly impossible for 3rd party developers to directly release simple binaries that work across their user's systems. Instead we have to add Chrome package repos to our Ubuntu installations that break across major releases.

It's stupid. There are better ways, which are evidenced by the fact that they're working, today, and have been working for some 20 odd years, and are being further defined in the AppStore model.

Maybe you should stop being so selfish by trying to force your inexperience and UNIX sysadmin use case on everyone.

> So you're saying that Mac OS, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS are all broken?

No. I said they solve some problems and don't solve others.

> And Linux's software distribution mechanism is working for end users?

I am yet to meet a non-technical Linux user who has experienced what could be described as "package management disaster". Software management is mostly automated for their use cases.

> Maybe you should stop being so selfish by trying to force your inexperience and UNIX sysadmin use case on everyone.

I solve my problems, you solve yours. Deal with it.

> No. I said they solve some problems and don't solve others.

Yes, they don't solve the problem of distributing messy UNIX software with complex and unstable dependency graphs, written for systems with anemic base libraries, that install a litter of files all over your system.

That's a good thing. In fact, I'd say the world would be a better place if we'd never implemented package managers and instead UNIXes were finally forced to clean up their mess. The real world doesn't work that way, so instead the best we can do is create new systems that don't inherit the mistakes of the old.

> I am yet to meet a non-technical Linux user who has experienced what could be described as "package management disaster". Software management is mostly automated for their use cases.

Use cases like, say, trying a new piece of software that hasn't been packaged?

Getting updates directly from the vendor?

Being able to have their vendor-supplied applications continue to work across major OS releases?

Or how about from the vendor perspective, where we have to deal with mistake-prone volunteers packaging up our software, inconsistent and incompatible libraries and an ever-shifting dependency graph. The only reason anything ever works at all is because there are hundreds/thousands of people whose sole contribution is to keep the entire dependency graph afloat. Just how many human hours do you think are spent on software packaging overhead?

> I solve my problems, you solve yours. Deal with it.

Thanks for elucidating exactly why Linux developed shouldn't be anywhere near the design process for consumer software like an OS.

You're projecting your view of Linux package management onto Haiku, when the situation with Haiku is going to be pretty different.

For starters, let's start with libraries. To use a concrete example, let's say the Cairo vector graphics library. What happens when a program requires Cairo 1.12.14? The library package gets downloaded. What happens when a second program requires Cairo 1.12.13 (i.e. the previous version)? The library gets stored alongside the newer version, so both are available. What happens when a program has forked Cairo, and requires that version? Hopefully the answer is clear.

So in this example we have three versions of Cairo. Seems inefficient right? In some ways it is, but efficiencies can emerge when programs do target the same version of Cairo on our system, as the library will already be ready for new programs to use.

It's also important to realise in what ways having these three libraries is inefficient. The only real issue here is storage, as we'd probably be looking at three times the storage space for the Cairo functionality. However, as inefficient as this is, it's still more efficient (from a storage point of view) than each application bundling its own libraries, as with installing the libraries separately there's at least a chance of the libraries being shared.

There is an alternative, which is to specify library versions that developers should use and bundle these with the system. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the functionality available to you is easier to scope out. The disadvantages are that recommended libraries get updated less frequently, so if you wish to use a new version you're either forced to wait or bundle your own library, which brings you back to the inefficiencies you had before.

Taking time to reflect, I see now that your issue isn't really with package managers per se, but rather that you dislike the 'rolling release' approach of many open-source projects. It's the shifting target that annoys you, how this gets managed is secondary. Would you say that's a fair appraisal?

I can report the opposite - I've had to assist a fedora user when yum/rpm left them in a state that prevented a ton of new packages from being installed due to an interaction between the official fedora repos and rpm fusion, the repo everyone tells you to add to fedora to get video drivers and codecs etc. It was actually quite complicated to resolve as packages relying on specific libraries that were being held back had to be identified, removed, external repo removed, libs updated, packages readded, repo readded.

All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum, and a few unwise version dependencies in some official packages, and an external repo that falls behind the official one a fair amount.

That is not a description of a well working system. And casuals frequently end up with tons of held back packages with apt because of not using dist-upgrade.

I'm a heavy linux user and happily deploy it all the time, but to suggest that current package management needs no improvement is insanity. It's a highly advanced system of bandaids for decades worth of iterative engineering on a core design that predated shared libraries, CVE's and when update cycles were well longer than a year.

A clean slate design would be an infinite improvement - it's just a crazy difficult problem without it basically being a new platform and requiring modifications to the 3rd party code that you're installing.

> I can report the opposite

For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly?

> All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum

So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens?

> For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly?

None. It built a massive teetering edifice of fragile interdependencies that incurs staggering human cost in maintenance, and has almost singlehandedly stood in the way of progress by third-parties that would benefit from working outside that system -- from commercial software vendors to OSS vendors that would prefer to be able to release versions on their own schedule.

If it wasn't for package managers making it possible to maintain fragile dependencies in lockstep, Linux distributions would have been forced to confront simple issues like ABI and API compatibility, third-party distribution, and other basic facets of producing a user-friendly and vendor-friendly OS ... we may have even had a "year of Linux on the desktop" by now.

Instead, we keep throwing humans at the problem of keeping the teetering pile of dependencies operational, largely because of people like you that cargo cult the ideas out of some strange combination of stockholm syndrome and a lack of vision for how things could be better.

Why was anyone was surprised that Google threw away the entire Linux user-space when developing Android?

> So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management.

... because that's the only way to achieve perfectly reasonable goals as a user.

If I want to install Chrome, guess what it does? It adds an external repository that broke in strange ways when I updated Ubuntu.

> If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens?

Your microwave doesn't refuse to operate unless you only buy food that has been prepackaged by your microwave vendor, that can only be mixed with other food also repackaged by that vendor, and only if all the food has been pre-certified to work together in that exact combination.

For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly?

Fedora systems often enter states where manual intervention with the package system is necessary to fix and issue preventing updates, they're usually just much simpler. And upgrading from major release to major release very commonly results in orphans or zombies. At least until the most recent release, the official instructions for resolving live upgrade issues involved 2-3 reboots and manual management of the package database in single user mode.

So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens?

No, it's the expected behavior of many fedora users and common among developers. Fedora has a zero tolerance policy on binary blobs and anything potentially ip encumbered. This is their arms length provider of such, and the official packagers will direct you there if you look to get your software included in the main repos but they have concerns about patent coverage.

They rely on the use of that repo so much that they actually first shipped gnome 3 with the open source nvidia driver they shipped with blacklisted because of how bad it was, and instructed nvidia users to install the proprietary drivers to get a working system.

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