The DUB package manager

Dicebot m.strashun at gmail.com
Sun Feb 17 13:42:02 PST 2013


On Sunday, 17 February 2013 at 21:32:15 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:40:25 +0100
> "Dicebot" <m.strashun at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Packaging is best done (and should be) by OS package manager, 
>> not hundreds of languages-specific managers. Good language 
>> package manager in my opinion is just an information source 
>> for OS package builders.
>
> I'm not real big on the idea of OS package managers. Not when 
> Unix is
> in the picture anyway. I'm getting really fed up with software 
> that has
> a "download / install" webpage populated with totally different
> instructions for an endless, yet always incomplete, list of 
> Linux
> variants. And *maybe* BSD. And then on top of that, the poor 
> *project*
> maintainers have to maintain all of that distro-specific cruft. 
> Unless
> they're lucky and the project is big enough that the ditro 
> maintainers
> are willing to waste *their* time converting the package into 
> something
> that only works on their own distro.
>
> I believe I can sum up my thoughts with: "Fuck that shit."

In perfect world that software should have only one download link 
- to sources. Habit to get stuff from some probably official web 
pages is Windows habit. I have no idea why .deb and .rpm are 
provided so often, have never used a single one. Probably habit 
again.

Then, if your project is small, it is in your interest to 
maintain packages for distros you want (minimal efforts comparing 
to software maintenance itself). If it is big, someone will be 
willing to do it for you. Simple and works naturally better with 
bigger user base.

In return you get one single way to get software from people you 
may somewhat trust and sane dependency tracking. Beats anything 
for me and recent move towards various repo-like "stores" only 
proves it.


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