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I've never liked package managers. I don't think it's the package managers themselves–they're just solutions in a lacking system. It's just that they remind me of the filesystem–a global no-versions namespace (yet not global enough), shifty, where things can change beneath you. https://twitter.com/Gilad_Bracha/status/1359582219132575747
Then I've got the 'system' packagers vs various 'product' packagers with overlaping packages.
In the end package managers are just a fancy remote copy command, no? If we think about it.. this whole mess arises from us not having figured out a good way of naming/locating things.
In the end package managers are just a fancy remote copy command, no? If we think about it.. this whole mess arises from us not having figured out a good way of naming/locating things.
Just look at how many namespaces we have to wrangle: you've got the local filesystem namespace; inside each git repo is a 'file@revision' namespace; apt, pypi, rubygems are 'versioned package' namespaces; each package then is a namespace of functions or whatever it provides.
Each namespace introduces its own way to reference the items within it. Sometimes objects are projected from one into the other ("installing" a package will "patch" stuff from the pkg object into your local filesystem).. now we need various provenance tracking mechanisms.
It seems everything from build systems to package managers to import statements (yes!) are a symptom, not a cure, of a problem so widespread we barely catch a glimpse of it. Yes there are some attempts to break out, but until then we must cope with multi-faceted dependency hell.
