[daa]

This comment thread is a bit depressing, but ignoring that.

One of the bits about the piece that has me scratching my head a bit is whether the mess that is dependency management in OSS operating systems (and generally OSS software distribution models) matters _enough_. While I very much share the author's reaction of "can't we do better?", it also feels that optimizing that mess isn't just a design exercise as much as a social one, because OSS isn't really a bazaar but a constellation of connected more-or-less-cathedralish bazaars. And I don't know that this mess is deeply problematic (although the author does find some egregious issues).

Design happens at a specific scale, and some scales reward investment in design more than others. Designing a chair that can be mass-produced is more effective than designing a room, which can't. One could argue that designing a self-contained piece of software (e.g. the Python runtime) matters more than designing a deliberately open system (e.g. the ecosystem of Python libraries), and that the alternative (random competition, forking, etc.) is Good Enough.

[for carbon dating: had my first IT job in the early 80s, as a teenager]