Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ris 2073 days ago
Binary packages make me sad too and I wish there were a way to mark them as such using a `meta` key.

It starts to become a bit of a grey area in some cases though. For instance - java packages. Is a .jar a binary? Probably. But so many java applications rely on pulling loads of .jars down from maven. Are we going to sit down and figure out how to build all those jars from source? It's not uncommon for there to be literally hundreds.
1 comments
catern 2073 days ago
I find that binary packages are quite rare for free/open source software. So avoiding proprietary software (with, e.g., allowUnfree = false) gets most of the way there.

I agree that it would be nice to tag (with meta) FOSS packages that aren't built from source, though. Every instance of that is a bug, IMO...

link
soraminazuki 2073 days ago
> I find that binary packages are quite rare for free/open source software.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case with some languages that have their own package managers, the prime example being Java as the parent commenter mentioned. It’s near impossible to build Java applications without fetching tons of binary jars from maven that Debian just gives up on providing their own package in many cases[1]. While Nix does build Java applications from source, the dependencies are fetched from maven in binary form.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Hadoop

link