The sorry, sorry state of Linux packaging
On one hand yeah, sure: today there are many more programs “packaged” for Linux than twenty years ago. On the other, I feel myself longing every year more for the good old days when lots of developers limited themselves to, you know, “we don’t release Linux binary packages of our software, because Linux distros are too fragmented and we don’t know for WHICH one we should build packages.”
Today, if you need ten programs not present in the default repositories of your Linux distribution, you may likely need to run almost as many separate software distribution systems, all deliberately created to simplify your life of course, all blissfully unaware of each other.
Forget compiling from sources: it would just move the problem to installing the same number of separate, possibly uncompatible toolchains, most of which are much more complex to set up and use that the good old “./configure make && make install” of yore.
Oh, and of course you should be prepared to re-run all those systems every time you upgrade your Linux distribution. Not manually, of course! Without doubts, the Right Thing To Do ™ would be to handle everything with some custom-made Ansible playbooks, or some other CM system, right? To add, that is, another level of embarrassing complexity to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
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