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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

If you program in OCaml be sure to checkout Batteries [1], it is an extension (which also replaces some stuff) to the standard library which eliminate most of the criticisms I had against OCaml. Also, don't try to avoid opam [2], I didn't really want to use it at first because I always prefer to use my system's package manager (using Debian), but it makes your life so much easier.

[1] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/

[2] https://opam.ocaml.org/

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If you haven't, also check out Jane Street's Core/Async, which is an almost-complete replacement (and extension) of the standard library. (Info here: http://janestreet.github.io/.) I work for JS so I'm biased, but I think it's quite a nice set of libraries. Because it's been developed mostly internally, we've had a lot of freedom to fix bad decisions, so it hasn't built up as much cruft as might be expected. (Although it is still obviously far from perfect.)

Do people try to avoid using package managers? Why? On my system I regularly use homebrew and opam but also have occasional need for pip, cabal and more recently npm. Not everything is packaged upstream (nor would I expect it to be).

I can't imagine how the OCaml ecosystem worked before opam as it's rapidly become a fundamental tool.

I don't know, my instinct tells me that I should avoid having many independent package managers in order to keep everything in the same place and avoid conflicts. But I don't really have any reasons to think that those are better ways to do things.

That's a pretty reasonable thing to want. One area where we'd like to improve OPAM is to output Debian and RPM spec files. This requires some surgery in various build systems, but would make upstreaming binary packages and releases so much easier...

My instinct agrees with you, but for one small matter. Ubuntu only just started packaging Ruby 1.9.3 - a version that came out years ago and which is to be deprecated next year - in the latest version.

I don't know about OCaml but trying to do Ruby or Python development without using pip or gems (not to mention virtualenvs or RVM gemsets etc.) seems like an exercise in futility and perpetual brokenness.

I'd like it if system package managers could actually keep up with the needs of developers, but they seem to have failed. Until they can get their shit together, we now have the irritation of managing all these many, many language-specific package managers rather than just using apt-get like sane people. If the system level package manager were able to talk to the language level package managers, that'd be a big improvement.

The number of times I've typed `sudo gem install nokogiri` and then had to fumble around and work out exactly which variant of libxml-dev-0 or whatever is needed before I can install a RubyGem with a native dependency shows we've got some brokenness that needs fixing.

Conveniently, opam uses the same upgrade description format as apt < http://www.mancoosi.org/cudf/ > which should make integration achievable.

> I'd like it if system package managers could actually keep up with the needs of developers, but they seem to have failed.

I would argue that they fail at this because it's a goal that's in direct conflict with their primary goal: to serve end users. The needs of developers are dramatically different. Having multiple versions of a package is a must for developers, but would just cause weird unpredictable issues for end users. (Unless you are very clever and do something like Nix, of course.)

I wrote more about this topic here: http://technomancy.us/151

OS package managerd can't keep up with programming language packages. Use the Langauge community's package manager.

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