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Comment by stefantalpalaru | Hacker News Reader

> Joe GNU/Linux User has just downloaded and untared this package.

Regular users are not supposed to install software like this. The only sane way to administer a distribution is to make sure everything passes through the official package manager. This leaves the developers and package maintainers to deal with autotools and I don't hear them complaining (very loud[1]).

Autotools is simply good enough for the job and instead of being some sort of hated legacy it's being sometimes preferred for new projects (cough [2] cough).

[1]: https://blog.flameeyes.eu/tag/autotoolsmythbuster/

[2]: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/vala-skeleton-autotools

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Software freedom is the ability to do whatever you want with the code, for example, compiling it. I'm not saying there's any sort of license violation here, but it's not in the spirit of software freedom to "not supposed to install software [from source]"

Granted, but the freedom to ruin one's system is not a freedom I would promote.

Installing software from source is a good thing, you just need to go through the intermediate process of creating a package for your distribution first.

Not every user has root/sudo access so they can install software system-wide (it's even arguable whether they should, instead of keeping those programs user-local).

Wait, what? I've been downloading, untarring, configuring, making, etc since as long as I've known anything about any unix. Since when is this the wrong way to do it?

Since we're not running Slackware any more and we have understood the need for package managers with proper dependency resolution capable of doing system-wide upgrades with one command.

In a perfect world, every single piece of software ever written is in every single distribution's package manager.

This is not always the case in reality, however.

In a perfect world, the following also holds:

- The versions in the repositories are always up-to-date with the latest numbered version.

- Users never want/need any features or bugfixes that haven't made it into the latest numbered version.

- Nobody ever needs to install an older version of anything, because new versions never introduce compatibility-breaking changes. Which of course are never necessary anyway, because software designers always have perfect foresight, so the initial design of every package is always something that will remain perfectly suited to it forever.

All those problems are fixed by providing a way for the users to maintain a local package repository (Like Gentoo does with its local overlay[1]).

The only downside to that is that it's more work to create new packages and you end up with part user / part maintainer hybrids that no longer fit the "regular Joe User" model.

[1]: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Overlay/Local_overlay

Of course not. The solution is for the user to create new packages from arbitrary tarballs instead of relying on "make install" and "make uninstall". But that's not a regular user anymore, is it?

I administer my system with apt-get, ... But when I develop for an old release of redhat, I need to compile some packages to have a couple of recent libraries.

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