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1. Embed this notice
   Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 03:30:51 JST Hisham

   • Ludovic Courtès
   • Biason::Julio::new();

   trying something different -- turning my comments in a lively Mastodon discussion thread into a blog post

   "There are two very different things called “package managers”" → https://hisham.hm/2024/12/16/there-are-two-very-different-things-called-package-managers/

   (thanks @civodul, @hipsterelectron and @juliobiason for the spark!)

   • Embed this notice
     Renne Rocha (rennerocha@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 03:40:49 JST Renne Rocha

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Biason::Julio::new();

     @hisham_hm @civodul @hipsterelectron @juliobiason there are so many discussion threads here (and in other places like this) where a blog post would be a great place to save the information for posterity. Mastodon threads are ephemeral (imo). Having a place to refer some discussion you had months ago is a good practice!

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Dec-2024 04:15:44 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Biason::Julio::new();
     • Pierre Chapuis
     • Svante

     @catwell In a similar vein, ‘guix import’ simplifies packaging work for a variety of repos:
     https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html

     But while it’s accurate for CRAN (meaning that it generates something that packagers can usually take as-is), it’s not as good for other repos, in particular PyPI, due to poor metadata quality I believe.

     I talked about this in a 2021 talk:
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTOkXlE_ac
     https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/talks/packaging-con-2021/grail/talk.20211110.pdf

     @juliobiason @hipsterelectron @Ardubal @hisham_hm

   • Embed this notice
     Pierre Chapuis (catwell@framapiaf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Dec-2024 04:15:45 JST Pierre Chapuis

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Biason::Julio::new();
     • Svante

     @hisham_hm @Ardubal @civodul @hipsterelectron @juliobiason I came here to say you can do this, and it was already said :)

     The Perl ecosystem typically has good tooling for this: https://metacpan.org/pod/CPANPLUS::Dist::Arch

   • Embed this notice
     Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Dec-2024 04:15:46 JST Hisham

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Biason::Julio::new();
     • Svante

     @Ardubal @civodul @hipsterelectron @juliobiason It's a different way of putting it, but dependency management is really the core of what a package manager does: a package manager is very roughly curl + unzip + a dependency manager + x,

     where for a language package manager x is "a build tool" and for a system package manager x is "a tool for dealing with build tools".

     The impedance mismatch between LPMs and SPMs is that if one uses the other, their dep mgrs are stacked, and often out of sync.

   • Embed this notice
     Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Dec-2024 04:15:46 JST Hisham

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Biason::Julio::new();
     • Svante

     @Ardubal @civodul @hipsterelectron @juliobiason one approach we took for dealing with that between a lang (Lua) and a system (Arch) was to:

     - run luarocks purely as a build tool (`--no-deps`)
     - clone luarocks pkgs into arch pkgs mechanically:
     - generate a new arch pkg for each luarocks pkg
     - parse the luarocks dependency tree and export the data as arch dependencies

     This doesn't auto-map the system deps present in Lua pkgs, but it's a start.

   • Embed this notice
     Svante (ardubal@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Dec-2024 04:15:47 JST Svante

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Biason::Julio::new();

     @hisham_hm @civodul @hipsterelectron @juliobiason Regarding »the success of Docker is the developer world’s tacit acknowledgement that package management has failed«:

     I think it's not package management, but dependency management that's failing. I believe it's crushing itself under its own weight. I can't yet put the finger on the most relevant causes for this, but I think that one of them is dynamic linking (or the analogous concepts in different ecosystems).