You pretty much entirely misunderstood what I was saying
... after misunderstanding the GP yourself
And therefore, when someone says something bad about Linux package management, you interpret it as an attack on the only thing which can provide sustainability, sharing of effort, etc. You need to take into account that people might be disagreeing with your axioms instead...
We're having a disagreement, not a brawl. Just because I haven't adopted your point of view based on a few casual, wishful remarks from yourself doesn't mean that I am stubbornly clinging to something for the sheer fun of it. I have responded because it seems like you're trying to say something interesting, I just can't figure out what it is. I certainly can't relate it to any actual experiences in using, supporting, maintaining and developing open source software. So I guess I'm trying to understand if you've arrived at your conclusions based on something real, or did you just like the sound of it?
You really, really don't get me. I think that, rather than helping, the existing Linux model is actually hindering.
I got that, but you have to offer some sort of reasoning or justification for this. I completely fail to see that ditching shared libraries wouldn't result in a net increase in burden - I'm trying to imagine this world, it's a forgotten pre-internet era which seems far more tedious for both users and developers alike. How would you address the concerns I raised? Can you address them, or am I supposed to simply accept that your scenario is better?
I just want to use my computer, code, and share my code. I don't want to babysit my computer in every excruciating detail. I wonder if what you actually have an issue with is more abstract - fragmentation from competing ecosystems? Community/contributor organisation? OSS collaboration/release practices? Development priorities? Policies?
And the reason for that is that when you really look into it, the things you say about how it helps all contain paradoxes which mean they actually hinder.
And yet, the very things you're saying are hindering us are prominent features in the platforms Ingo wants us to reproduce!
For example, build and test infrastructure isn't actually shared, it's duplicated -- each distro does build and test on its own, because each distro is trying to tweak thousands of applications.
Again, more misunderstanding. Distros do not run build & test infrastructure because they're tweaking applications. Yes, it happens, but the vast majority of packages are completely unmodified, using distro-specific build parameters which are supported by the toolchain and is *not* upstream's concern. In fact (especially in the case of libraries) the human involvement in updating a package with upstream is simply running a tool which automates this!
The reason distros run build & test infra is to confirm that upstream have released something sane and behaves correctly in the distro's environment. Which is exactly what the platforms Ingo advocates do as well - Android, iOS, Windows Mobile.
You haven't shown me any technical challenge yet. And I don't buy that "use of packages or package management systems" equates with "OMFG what a waste of unnecessary extra work for everybody". Nobody is forcing anyone to package anything, and if you look carefully the "too many packages" argument can be re-cast as a "move stuff out of main and into contrib/universe" - or abandon the latter entirely, which is what PPAs or vendor/project-specific repos are all about. Hell, I can't be the only one using Oracle, MongoDB, and other project/vendor-specific repos can I?
You really, really don't get me. I think that, rather than helping, the existing Linux model is actually hindering.
You said that, I know you're saying that. But mere statements don't convey meaning or understanding or in fact any actionable information at all. Do distros package too much? Yes, but I have to say things have already been quietly changing for many years now: there's heaps of places to get pacakges other than the distro's official archives. What about the assertion that packages are bad, build/test infra is bad? Ingo advocates mobile platforms which:
- Have their own package format. The horror!
- Have their own duplicate build/test/validation infrastructure (arbitrarily) gating releases
- Have a centralized, curated repository for distribution
I am trying to understand, but I have yet to see any technical challenge. About the only real difference I see is chucking most stuff out of "main" repositories to focus on a core set of a few hundred things (1000+ packages) or so; and asking all software authors to drop everything to make sure they can be bothered to do the packaging of the chucked-out stuff for us (on all architectures).
Which means each distro and upstream software pretending that all the other distros don't exist; hence my comment about consolodation.