alt Hacker NewsI mean … it clearly isn’t working well if problems like “what is the libssl distribution called in a given Linux distro’s package manager?” and “installing a MySQL driver in four of the five most popular programming languages in the world requires either bundling binary artifacts with language libraries or invoking a compiler toolchain in unspecified, unpredictable, and failure-prone ways” are both incredibly common and incredibly painful for many/most users and developers.
The idea of a protocol for “what artifacts in what languages does $thing depend on and how will it find them?” as discussed in the article would be incredibly powerful…IFF it were adopted widely enough to become a real standard.
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> what is the libssl distribution called in a given Linux distro’s package manager?
I think you're going to need to know that either way if you want to run a dynamically linked binary using a library provided by the OS. A package manager (for example Cargo) isn't going to help here because you haven't vendored the library.
To match the npm or pip model you'd go with nix or guix or cmake and you'd vendor everything and the user would be expected to build from scratch locally.
Alternatively you could avoid having to think about distro package managers by distributing with something like flatpak. That way you only need to figure out the name of the libssl package the one time.
Really issues shouldn't arise unless you try to use a library that doesn't have a sane build system. You go to vendor it and it's a headache to integrate. I guess there's probably more of those in the C world than elsewhere but you could maybe just try not using them?
Assuming that your distro is, say, Debian, then you'll know the answer to that is always libssl-dev, and if you cannot find it then there's a handy search tool (both CLI and web page: https://packages.debian.org) to help you.
I'm not very familiar with MySQL, but for C (which is what we're talking about here) I typed mysql here and it gave me a bunch of suggestions: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default§ion=all... Debian doesn't ship binary blobs, so I guess that's not a problem.
"I have to build something on 10 different distros" is not actually a problem that many people have.
Also, let the distros package your software. If you're not doing that, or if you're working against the distros, then you're storing up trouble.