Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cies 1554 days ago
> it would solve one of Linux's biggest pain points as a software developer.

Maybe true for proprietary software, but for FLOSS it is a non issue once your software has traction and gets picked up by distributions. I wrote a piece of open source in ~2002 and it is still found in pretty much all distros AND I never spend a minute in pain over packaging difficulties.

IMHO, the basic package managers work REALLY well for FLOSS. The gave me a peak into the AppStore/PlayStore(tm) experience (but then without all the spyware), waaaaay before they even existed.
1 comments
dataangel 1553 days ago
Having N distributions repeat almost identical packaging work on different schedules and sometimes falling many versions behind is not a "non issue". You're excusing something Linux is genuinely bad at. I say this as someone using it personally and professionally for 12+ years.
link
aragilar 1553 days ago
Sure some distros have many derivatives, but it's not obvious to me that you can stop that (see Android for a different open-source ecosystem, and how fractured that is), nor that is always a bad thing, as it allows experimentation which can flow up to the parents.

I'm not sure though "almost identical packaging work" is accurate, maybe that applies to Debian and Fedora (and their derivatives), but Gentoo and Nix are examples of doing something quite different (not to mention the different embedded distros), and so the "duplicate work" is anything but that.

link
cies 1553 days ago
Also I was replying to:

> it would solve one of Linux's biggest pain points as a software developer.

Not the pain of the distro-people. That may be mitigated with a universal standard of snap or flatpak.

link