[human_banana]

A good packaging system for C/C++ would go a long way. CPAN, php pear, pip, go get, etc, etc. all have at least decent package management, support for third part repos, and ways to add a package without using the manager for things you've manually downloaded / coded yourself.

Trying to get multiple C packages from third parties all working together is rough compared to other languages. Rust has me a little spoiled, I guess.

[skocznymroczny]

I think it's easier for Rust (and other languages such as D, Crystal), because they started from scratch. Cargo is accepted as the way to build and distribute stuff on Rust, full stop. There are no endless debates whether Cargo should be used, or something else.

Meanwhile, in C/C++ world, build systems are a mess. You have so many tools. Some folks just use what IDE provides, e.g. MSVC solutions. Some people use CMake. Some people have their handcrafted Makefile solutions. Sure, it works on their platforms, but it's very hard to make it portable. With Cargo and similar, you just go "cargo get" (don't know the exact command, don't use Rust) and you can expect the packages to download and build as needed.

[pjmlp]

Conan and vcpkg are setting up as the two main winners of C++ package managers.

[PetahNZ]

"php pear", its composer now FWIW.

[umanwizard]

What’s wrong with apt?

[disconnected]

What's wrong with apt is that you can't get what YOU want: you can only get whatever the Debian people decided makes sense for one specific version of the OS - which usually means a 2 years out of date version of the library.

If you need a library of a version other than the Debian approved version, you are back to manually downloading source tarballs from sourceforge and figuring out their arcane build system.

Also, apt doesn't let you have two versions of the same library installed. For SOME things, they have more than one version package, but in general, you can't have STABLE_VERSION installed for your day-to-day OS usage and DEVELOPMENT_VERSION installed for your development needs. You only get one or the other (this isn't exclusive of apt - all Linux package managers do this, AFAIK).

Anyway, contrast that situation with pip (python), where you can just grab whatever version you want, have the package manager solve the dependencies for you, and slap it all into a virtualenv where it won't interfere with your system-level libraries. Heck, you can even grab versions straight from git, and it will (try to) solve the dependencies (if any).

It's a WHOLE different level of convenience.

[umanwizard]

First of all, the most popular apt-based distro is not Debian, it is Ubuntu. Second, you can set your apt sources to whatever you want. Plenty of people publish apt repositories other than the Ubuntu project. Confluent for example makes all their software (Kafka etc) available through their own apt repositories.

[wwright]

Many package managers support an “install root,” and there’s always Docker containers.

Those obviously don’t solve many of the other issues that a real Package manager would, of course.

[isatty]

I agree - but the counter example I'd give is portage which gives you all that and more.

[celticmusic]

dpkg -i deb_file_I_downloaded_off_the_interwebz

phew, that vendor lockin that includes tools to install whatever I want!

[disconnected]

sigh

That random file you downloaded off the internet was built under a specific set of assumptions - assumptions that only hold true if you are running the specific OS version they were targeting.

IF you download the .deb file for your specific OS, and IF you manually install all missing dependencies, then it works. Otherwise, you are still screwed.

At least you can extract it (IIRC, it's just a zip file anyway). But that's no different from going to sourceforge or github or whatever and getting the source tarball... and we are back where we started.

By the way, I was not complaining about "vendor lock-in". I was complaining about Debian's package management policies and how they can affect your software development process in practice - to make the case that apt is a crap replacement for a proper language/library/development/whatever oriented package management.

[celticmusic]

Yes, it turns out that installation of software has the assumption that you're putting it on the right OS. This is the case for Windows, for Mac, and so forth.

I've never had an issue with a deb package, but I'll tell you it's one of the reasons I stick with Ubuntu for home.

[dgellow]

No windows support. No macos support. No "not-debian-based system" support.

[onei]

Why would a Linux package manager support Windows which has its own very different package format? I can't ever recall installing a Windows package that decided it would go and download some other dependencies - or at least not transparently. The two are vastly different beasts.

[maple3142]

That's why I think C and C++ need a OS-agnostic package manager.

[dgellow]

Yes, that’s the point :)

People who are suggesting a debian specific package manager to fetch C/C++ dependency issues are missing the full picture