I think I didn't miss. Author of the article wants his software in distribution. He should clearly take into account how distribution works and maybe constrained himself to the dependencies already in the distribution.
Then again, he should take into account that the dependencies are in large part liabilities, and it's not only that the distribution may not have them packaged (left-pad again!). Maybe he just lacks experience that he happily uses whatever gets into his hands.
> If you force your developers to [think of packaging], your packaging system is broken.
It was working for over a decade without many issues (after "RPM hell" was more or less resolved), why would it suddenly stop working around five years ago? Around the same time version and tool churn popped out?
And this Flatpak thing looks like "let's bundle all the OS libraries" (I may be wrong, but it's hard to come by a technical description on its website, so I'm forced to extrapolate). In this regard it's not far from static linking and all the bad things that it leads to.
EDIT: The other one, snapcraft, says clearly that it bundles all the dependencies. Why did they choose Zip format for Linux/unix-only tool is beyond me, though.
> You are prepared to do it, good for you. But not every developer is like that.
They should. They work with those operating systems. They should know how they work, not avoid learning anything by using Bundler or VirtualEnv. I've seen too many so called "programmers" or "developers" who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag once they did something stupid to their OS, like forcing installation of a broken RPM or accidentally setting 777 permissions on /tmp.