Ubuntu installers?

[Joel Rees]

Sigh.

2023年1月7日(土) 21:04 Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com>:

>
>
> On Sat, 7 Jan 2023 at 22:46, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 7 Jan 2023 at 10:37, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Just produce a distribution that has a single package manager
>> ...
>>
>> Isn't this exactly what Ubuntu is aiming for with snaps?
>>
>
> IDK, but if that is so, then am I correct in thinking that every other
> package manager can be removed and in8stalled as a snap if the user wants
> something else?
>

Not sure whether I should bring the elephant in the room up at this point,
but ...

Or which elephant.

Okay, let's keep things light.

Dependency hell is the problem. Nobody has really solved the problems of
assembling applications from disparate parts sourced from developers from
opposite ends of multiple spectra of methodologies and architectural
affinities. We have barely begun to solve the versioning problem, but
aren't yet really very far along.

Package managers were invented to solve both those problems, and a few
other difficult problems, as well. Each was invented for a fairly cohesive
group that shared methodologies and architectural affinities. That's why
they don't mix all that well. Get a package manager out of context, and it
doesn't work very well. If you use the current descendants of RPM on
Debian, you have to surround it with a separate library tree. Not
impossible, but tricky.

Terabyte disks for cheap makes such things more feasible.

Snaps were an extension of the idea of separate library trees – give every
application its own library tree – which is great, except that it isn't.
Getting every snap to be able to keep itself up to date is just one of the
easier problems that shows up.

Mac OS is essentially a single cohesive dev group. If you start loading
FOSS software that didn't get developed within that group, or doesn't have
a maintenance team within that group, and you end up installing one or more
of something like nine 3rd party package managers. And they can end up
fighting with each other.

Likewise MSWindows. If you want FOSS there, you will install Cygwin or
MinGW or something like that.

It's the nature of the beast, until we as an industry can figure out for
real what software engineering entails.

And that gets into stuff that is tantamount to religion. (For good reason.
Software is abstract.)

I could solve the problem – with a budget in the range of millions of
dollars, but it would add yet another solution incompatible with the rest.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20230107/2f573bab/attachment.html>