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by CountSessine 1637 days ago
Versus no dependency management at all? This reasoning falls apart once you need to use a 3rd party library on Windows. There’s no standard way of sharing such a thing so you always wind up packaging the whole thing with your program, and handing the whole mess to your users.

Granted, writing an RPM is a special kind of hell, but at least you don’t have to package everything with your program. But actually you can still do that - I’ve done that plenty of times in embedded. You can always ship your program with its dependant libraries the way you always have to on Windows. In fact it’s a lot easier because most 3rd party libraries were originally coded on Linux and build more sanely on Linux. And RPATHs are pretty easy to figure out.

Linux gives you options.
2 comments
torginus 1637 days ago
Yeah, you're right, but you probably need a lot less stuff that's not in the SDK. My go to solution for including dependencies, is just checking in all the dependency .lib, include files into Git LFS (I think this is a rather common approach from what I've seen on Git). For your typical Linux C/C++ project, unless it's made by best in class C++ devs, building can be a pain, most likely because it depends on very particular lib versions, building a largish project from GitHub for Ubuntu 21.10, where the original dev used 20.04 is usually not possible without source/Makefile tweaks. And I don't particularly love the idea of using root access to install packages to just build some random person's project.

IMHO, C++ dependency management kinda stinks, regardless of platform.

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nicoburns 1636 days ago
> IMHO, C++ dependency management kinda stinks, regardless of platform.

Indeed, and the fact that it's platform-specific in the first place certainly doesn't help!

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dgfitz 1636 days ago
Writing an rpm isn’t difficult… is that a commonly held belief? Maybe I don’t know what I don’t know, but I’ve found wrapping my head around deb packaging much harder than rpms.
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CountSessine 1636 days ago
When I last wrote one I was very new to it and rpm.org (where most of the public docs on the format reside I guess) was down/abandoned. It looks like rpm.org and the docs are back now? I had a bunch of special requirements for the lib I was making and not having docs for the format, especially all the funny macros, was pretty frustrating.
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