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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

> If it were that simple,

It is that simple.

> why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.

Because there's a huge difference between a user downloading/running a binary, and software package management in an OS. The former is not maintainable, your binaries will be out of date soon, etc. But, if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun.

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> if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun.

I really do want to do this, precisely because the software in the repo is often out of date, if it is even there at all! I really don't like the idea of a mandatory middleman between the developer and the user.

And since I really do want to do this, and do it often, I can say with quite a bit of certainty that

> It is that simple.

Is complete and utter bullshit! Sometimes you get lucky and the developer produces AppImages or a static binary, sometimes you're less lucky and have to grab the binary and its dependencies and write a startup script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH, sometimes you're even less lucky than that and get to use patchelf to force it to use a compatible ld.so, but most of the time you end up having to compile the damn thing from source like it is 1975.

Oh wow that sounds exactly like the kind of problems package mamagers solve. Your complaint basically boils down to - nobody prepared a one click package of latest version for free for me.

My complaint comes down to the following: why must there be a middle man between the developer and user, why must there be a separate middleman for every repo, why must said repo prevent me from installing older versions, why must the package manager prevent me from installing to alternative paths... basically, why does the community insist that this simple task that was the de-facto way to install software for DOS, MacOS (classic), NeXT, RiscOS, and MacOS (recent) insist on being complicated and restrictive in Linux?

And if package managers really solved the problem, why do so many projects deploy with Docker? Why do FlatPak and Snap exist, let alone my preferred AppImage?

> why must there be a middle man between the developer and user, why must there be a separate middleman for every repo,

Guix allows you to easily write own package definitions which are treated as part of the whole system. If you submit them and they are accepted, they simply become part of Guix.

> why must said repo prevent me from installing older versions,

Precisely this is a case that Guix solves extremely well: One can start environments with specific versions of packages, like in Pyhon's virtualenv.

And by the way, the complexity is caused by the issue that many many components need to fit together. That does not happen by chance, it is a massive amount of work to make it fit in a manageable way, and check that it works. That's what distributions do.

And yet many operating systems throughout history have not needed to do that. The complexity is not inherent to the problem space, it is a creation of the community.

> I really do want to do this, precisely because the software in the repo is often out of date,

That depends much on the distribution you use (if recentness is most important, why do you don't use Arch), and being out of date is definitely not the case for Guix System:

http://distrowatch.org/dwres.php?firstlist=guixsd&firstversi...

Sp, why are you bringing an argument that does not apply to Guix?

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