[tedunangst]

As somebody who occasionally uses software, besides just developing it, learning the command syntax and idiosyncrasies of a half dozen package systems is a pain in the butt. I want to type "pkg_add things I want" and be done with it.

[chimeracoder]

Not to mention that package management isn't a problem that should be solved at every single level possible - package management for the OS, package management for developing in $LANGUAGE, package management for extensions of $PROGRAM written in $LANGUAGE, etc....

Aside from the fact that that's redundant, it's highly error-prone.

[hosh]

As a long time Rails dev, I never trust the package maintainer's OS packages for Rails. I need specific versions of Rails and gems, often times specific git commits.

In places where the IT staff insists on making sure this isn't "redundant", they usually use something like fpm to create a deb or an rpm out of the gem specified by Gemfile. Which you then have to drop into a custom deb/rpm repository. On top of that, the ops staff don't know how to do that properly, so they end up with a bunch of testing and development dependencies that the Rails application doesn't need.

... or, you have the deploy process call, "bundle install"

The redundancy is in the OS packages, not in application dependencies. So it is actually better to automate such with something like Chef and Puppet. From there, I can define exactly what the application needs from the OS.

I have seen this play out in a lot of ways, devs vs. sys admin. In the past, sys admins "win" since compute resources were still scarce. We're in the age of virtual machines now and configuration automation. Applications get their own VMs, sometimes in multiple nodes. We don't have Unix high priests guarding the altar with SSH keys, hand-deploying things in secret early-morning ceremonies. We have automation to deploy for us, which means we want to make it easier for the automation to deploy, not necessarily for someone to shell in and maneuver around with hand installations.

Things being application-centric, the "right" thing is to conform to the requirements of the dev team's app, not the other way around.

[igravious]

Therefore 'pkg_add' needs to be able to hook into 'gem install' and 'gem list' and save you (and me) the bother. And this needs to be solved for apt and yum and homebrew and so on as well. I don't know, something needs to be done definitely.