[palata]

You're saying the exact opposite of the original point, which is: you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources.

You are a good candidate to package for your distro, so there's that. And then for a random distro, if nobody feels like packaging for it, then it's just not there. Either there is not enough interest in your project, or there is not enough interest in the distro itself.

[curt15]

> distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources.

Is Devault basically saying that the application developer should just throw their source code over the wall and hope that other parties notice and figure out how to build it correctly? I would find that model of software distribution unsatisfying as a developer because merely distributing a source tarball and leaving the rest to middlemen makes it difficult for me to predict how my users will experience the final product. Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended. I would prefer to establish a more direct relationship with my users; to personally build and test my software in all environments that I support; and to hear directly from users whenever they experience problems.

[skydhash]

> Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended

I think that everyone who is worrying about that wants to apply corporate thinking on the open source model. Meaning they want to be a special thing where everything is supposed to be interchangeable. Just yesterday, I was compiling a program that hard depends on the GNU C library for just 2 functions and not even critical one. To be fair, the author said that they only test on Debian.

While the linux world may be fragmented, the true differences are mostly minimal (systemd vs other init system, glibc vs musl, networking manager,…) So it’s possible to decouple yourself from these concerns if you want to. But often the developer hard depends on decision made by their preferred distro team, and create a complicated build script that only works there.

[palata]

I don't know what Devault says, but here is my opinion: do not ship something you don't understand/test/use yourself.

Distros should not package random open source projects they don't use/understand, and developers should not package their project for distros they don't use/understand. For both, it's like shipping untested code and the conclusion is always going to be "you should all run the same system I do" or "we should all have the exact same system, let's implement Flatpak".

Developers should package their project for the distros they support (often that's just Ubuntu). Random people should package the open source projects they want to use in their distro of choice (the more popular the distro, the higher the chance that someone else has done it already). All that under the supervision of distro maintainers.

[troupo]

> distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources.

That's how you ended up with Erlang being split into 20+ packages on Ubuntu/Debian in the past. Because it was packaged by people who know little about erlang, and had too much time on their hands probably.

And that is the main issue: you want distro maintainers to compile and package every single pieces of software under the sun, but they can't possibly know every piece of software, how it works, or how it's supposed to work. Times that by the number of distros.

[palata]

> you want distro maintainers to compile and package every single pieces of software under the sun

No. I want people who will actually use the package to package the software they need, and distro maintainer to supervise that.

> Because it was packaged by people who know little about erlang

Yep, people who won't use Erlang shouldn't package Erlang. But on the other hand, developers who won't use Erlang on platform X shouldn't package Erlang on platform X.

The "we absolutely need flatpak because otherwise it fundamentally doesn't work" philosophy is, to me, very close to saying "we must consolidate everything under one single OS. Everybody should use the exact same thing otherwise it doesn't work". That's not what I want. I want to have freedom, and the cost of it is that I may have to package stuff from time to time.

If you don't want to contribute to your distro, choose a super popular distro where everything is already packaged (and used!). Or use macOS. Or use Windows. You don't get to complain about Alpine Linux not having a package you want: you chose Alpine, that was part of the deal.

[skydhash]

Alpine is a great litmus test for programs that unnecessarily depends on glibc and systemd. More often than not, it’s easy to take the arch build script, and create a package for alpine. When that fails, it’s usually for the above reason.

[troupo]

> I want people who will actually use the package to package the software they need, and distro maintainer to supervise that.

Erm... Your original comment said "you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources."

> Yep, people who won't use Erlang shouldn't package Erlang. But on the other hand, developers who won't use Erlang on platform X shouldn't package Erlang on platform X.

So... Who's gonna package it if you say that distros should package it?

> The "we absolutely need flatpak because otherwise it fundamentally doesn't work" philosophy is, to me, very close to saying "we must consolidate everything under one single OS.

Bullshit.

What you advocate for is "why bother with ease of use and convenience, everyone should learn how to compile and package everything from scratch"

> If you don't want to contribute to your distro

The user of a package doesn't necessarily know how to package something, and shouldn't need to.

[palata]

> Erm... Your original comment said "you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources."

Yes. I said "distros", not "the distro maintainers". The distro is the maintainers + the packagers, and packagers can be random contributors (I package stuff for my distro when needed, but I am not a distro maintainer).

> So... Who's gonna package it if you say that distros should package it?

People who will use Erlang on that particular distro. Under the supervision of the distro maintainers. There is typically some kind of hierarchy where there are the "community" packages that are just "untested" (sometimes they can get promoted to a more trusted level), and the "core" packages that are handled by the distro maintainers.

> What you advocate for is "why bother with ease of use and convenience, everyone should learn how to compile and package everything from scratch"

Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros, and you don't understand what I'm saying (probably I'm not being clear, that's on me).

What I advocate seems absolute common sense: "the package maintainer(s) should understand and use the package on the distro for which is is packaged".

The vast majority (probably almost the totality of) users of Ubuntu or Arch have never had a need to package anything, because everything is already there. Because those distros are very popular. Depending on your choice of distro, it may happen that a package hasn't been contributed or even that it doesn't compile (e.g. if you use musl). In that case, if you want it, you need to contribute it. But if you use musl, you implicitly accept this and are supposed to know what you are doing.

> The user of a package doesn't necessarily know how to package something, and shouldn't need to.

That's your opinion. I would say that a Gentoo user is expected to have some idea about compiling packages, otherwise they should not use Gentoo. Ubuntu is targetting people who don't want to know how it works, that's fine too. Diversity is good.

What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them. "We should all use systemd and Flatpak, and pay one team of 50 people who know how that works, and the rest of us should just use it and not know about it" -> I disagree with that. Those who think that should just use Ubuntu/Windows/macOS and leave me alone. And for those who use Ubuntu, they should remember that they don't pay for it next time they say "it's shit because it doesn't do exactly what I want".

[troupo]

> and packagers can be random contributors

So who's going to maintain the packages? Who's going to test them against other packages? Against distro upgrades? Who's going to fix issues?

> Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros

I do. A small number of people are doing the thankless job of packaging, maintaining, fixing, testing a multitude of packages.

And their efforts are needlessly duplicated across several packaging systems.

> What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them

What I don't like is people assuming ill intent behind "you know what would be great? If we didn't assume that every user has to package their own packages across 15 different incompatible packaging systems".

[palata]

> So who's going to maintain the packages? Who's going to test them against other packages? Against distro upgrades? Who's going to fix issues?

I feel like you're not reading what I'm writing. The community.

That's how open source works: if you use an open source project and it has a bug, you can fix it and open an MR. If the upstream project doesn't want your fix, you can fork. Nothing forces the upstream project to accept your contributions. When they do, they take the responsibility for them (to some extent, as in: it is now part of their codebase).

If your distribution doesn't have a package you want, you can make it for yourself, locally. You can contribute it to a community repo (most distros have that). Maybe at some point, the distro maintainers will decide to take over your package in a more official repo, maybe not. Even if you are not the official maintainer of a package, if you use it and see a problem, you can contribute a fix.

In the open source world, most people are freeriders. A (big) subset of those feel entitled and are simply jerks. And a minority of people are not freeriders and actually contribute. That's the deal.

> And their efforts are needlessly duplicated across several packaging systems.

No! No no no no! If they don't want to put efforts into that, they don't have to. They could use Ubuntu, or Windows, or macOS. If they contribute to, say, Alpine or Gentoo, that's because they want to. I am not on Gentoo in the hope that it will become Ubuntu, that would be weird. But you sound like you want to solve "my Gentoo problems" by making it look more like Ubuntu (in the idea). Don't use Gentoo if you don't want to, and leave me alone! Don't try to solve my problems, you're not even a Gentoo user.