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by Joker_vD 150 days ago
Well, if you're fine with using 3-year old versions of those libraries packaged by severely overworked maintainers who at one point seriously considered blindly converting everything into Flatpaks and shipping those simply because they can't muster enough of manpower, sure.

"But you can use 3rd party repositories!" Yeah, and I also can just download the library from its author's site. I mean, if I trust them enough to run their library, why do I need opinionated middle-men?
1 comments
rwmj 150 days ago
If this is a concern (which it rarely is) then you can pitch in with distro packaging. Volunteers are always welcome.

> "But you can use 3rd party repositories!"

That's not something I said.

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Joker_vD 149 days ago
> That's not something I said.

This was a pre-emptive rebuttal to the non-answer "well, you're not limited to the official repositories, so apt/yum/etc. is absolutely fine, use only it" I always get unless I include this very rebuttal.

> then you can pitch in with distro packaging. Volunteers are always welcome.

Or I can just do something more useful and less straining?

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sebastos 150 days ago
>(which it rarely is)

You're saying it's _rare_ for developers to want to advance a dependency past the ancient version contained in <whatever the oldest release they want to support> is?

Speaking for the robotics and ML space, that is simply the opposite of a true statement where I work.

Also doesn't your philosophy require me to figure out the packaging story for every separate distro, too? Do you just maintain multiple entirely separate dependency graphs, one for each distro? And then say to hell with Windows and Mac? I've never practiced this "just use the system package manager" mindset so I don't understand how this actually works in practice for cross-platform development.

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