alt Hacker NewsRPM "solved" it too.
I hate package management so much. I hate installing unnecessary cruft to get a box with what I want on it.
It makes me pine for tarballs built on boxes w/ compilers installed and deployed directly onto the filesystem of the target machines.
Edit: I'd love to see package management abstracted to a set of interfaces so I could use my OS package manager for all of the bespoke package management that every programming language seems hell-bent on re-implementing.
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themafia • yesterday at 9:02 PM
> It makes me pine for tarballs built on boxes w/ compilers installed and deployed directly onto the filesystem of the target machines.
You're effectively describing Gentoo.
Just a personal opinion but it's awesome.
I think there's a fundamental difference between programming language repos and package repositories like the official RPM, deb, and ports trees.
These (typically) operating system repos have oversight and are tested to work within a set of versions. Repositories with public contribution and publishing don't have any compatibility guarantees, so the cruft described in the article must be kept indefinitely.
Unfortunately, I don't think abstracting those repositories to work within the OS package ecosystem would solve that problem and I suspect the package manager SAT solvers would have a hard time calculating dependencies.