For many distributions (redhat, ubuntu lts, debian) packages can grow rather old. If you want something more up-to-date, linuxbrew can help. I suppose that's less useful on rolling distros like gentoo or arch.
I ran into this the other day with ubuntu (on a windows laptop with the linux subsystem) opting for node version 8 instead of 10.
One of those annoying things that is valid from a "lets keep things backwards compatible" point of view that ends you up with the wrong versions of everything you care about as a developer. I fixed it by uninstalling node and then installing nvm and then doing a nvm install 10. Of course having per tool custom hacks around "your distribution comes with the wrong version of everything you care about, 100% guaranteed" gets old pretty quickly. Brew fixes this on Mac.
On most servers on the other hand, you should not be installing developer tools or runtimes at all and use something like docker instead. Installing stuff like node.js, python, ruby, etc. via the default package manager is almost always the wrong thing to do on both development machines and production machines.
Speaking of docker, having something like brew on a lightweight image could be a pretty awesome way of installing what you need without relying on downloading tar balls and other madness that you find in a typical Dockerfile. Why reinvent that wheel?
I haven't come across linux brew. Sounds like a good idea. Merging the two ecosystems sounds like a better one. Having that on windows as well; awesome. Simplifies a lot of stuff developers have to do on different platforms to end up with the same tools.
I think that's a good example of how the whole paradigm of package management as an application distribution mechanism (at least as implemented) is really terrible. What good is all this management if I have to bypass it and everything it supposedly provides just to get up to date software, or two versions of the same software?
I totally agree with you. I think it's pretty pointless to have terabytes of repos for software that then grows stale.
But distributions often say that it's the only way to keep the whole "ecosystem" of a distribution stable.
So? What I think is that Linux "distributions" are growing less and less useful nowadays. On the desktop, no Linux was able to gain significant traction, and many developers are just using Macs and Windows with WSL.
On the server side, ways to "build your own distro" for creating a tuned stack for your purposes ( read: docker images ) exist and seem more useful than standard distro components. Nixos is another take.
Yes, "just apt install foo" is nice, until it isn't. I think we're at a tipping point between the old and new approach.
> But distributions often say that it's the only way to keep the whole "ecosystem" of a distribution stable.
In practice, it doesn't work. I did a Debian Stretch `apt-get upgrade` and it pulled in a new version of firefox-esr that did not run on my Rockchip Chromebook. Debian was forced to do it because it was end-of-life for the older firefox-esr, and Debian's security backports policy doesn't scale for projects like Chromium and Firefox.
One of those annoying things that is valid from a "lets keep things backwards compatible" point of view that ends you up with the wrong versions of everything you care about as a developer. I fixed it by uninstalling node and then installing nvm and then doing a nvm install 10. Of course having per tool custom hacks around "your distribution comes with the wrong version of everything you care about, 100% guaranteed" gets old pretty quickly. Brew fixes this on Mac.
On most servers on the other hand, you should not be installing developer tools or runtimes at all and use something like docker instead. Installing stuff like node.js, python, ruby, etc. via the default package manager is almost always the wrong thing to do on both development machines and production machines.
Speaking of docker, having something like brew on a lightweight image could be a pretty awesome way of installing what you need without relying on downloading tar balls and other madness that you find in a typical Dockerfile. Why reinvent that wheel?
I haven't come across linux brew. Sounds like a good idea. Merging the two ecosystems sounds like a better one. Having that on windows as well; awesome. Simplifies a lot of stuff developers have to do on different platforms to end up with the same tools.