Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2011-06-19 at 21:19 +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
[ . . . ]
> When I first started thinking about Orbit I decided for source packages. 
> The reason for this is that the developer only have to create one 
> package or doesn't have to build the app/lib for all supported platforms 
> when releasing a new version of the package (although it would be good 
> to know that it works on all supported platforms).
[ . . . ]

OS-level package manages have this issue, Ports went for source and
compiling as needed on the grounds that this is most flexible, Debian,
Fedora, etc. went for binary on the grounds it is far, far easier for
the users.

I find that most of the time MacPorts is fine as long as you only own
one computer, but for things like Boost, MacQt, etc. my machines takes
hours and hours to upgrade which really, really pisses me off.  I find
Debian package far more straightforward and furthermore binary packages
can be cached locally so I only have to download once for all 4 machines
I have.  With source download I end up compiling twice one for each Mac
OS X machine.  So overall source packages suck -- even though they are
reputedly safer against security attacks.

Ubuntu has introduced the idea of personal build farms, aka PPAs, which
work very well.  This handles creating packages for all the version of
Ubuntu still in support.  Using something like Buildbot, which although
supposedly a CI system can easily be "subverted" into being a package
creation farm.

I guess the question is really should the package manager be easy for
developers or easy for users?  If there are no packages because it is
too hard for developers to package then no users either.  If developers
can do things easily, but it is hard for users, then no users so no
point in creating packages.

It's worth noting that there is massive move in the Java arena to issue
binary, source and documentation artefacts -- where originally only
binary artefacts were released.  This is for supporting IDEs.  Clearly
source only packaging gets round this somewhat, but this means
compilation on the user's machine during install, and that leads to
suckiness -- see above for mild rant.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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