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Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

You're making a distinction between "packagers" and "users" which does not exist. Packagers are advanced users that take the initiative to improve their distro when they find software they want to use and that isn't integrated in their distro.

> Let the new complicated juggernaut software be deployed and configured by the users, according to developers' instructions, using whatever modern mechanism they prefer

I'm not sure what "they" refers to here (developers or users). The existence of packagers is proof that some subset of users "prefer" that software "be deployed and configured" via distro package managers.

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I meant ordinary users should rely on developers' defaults. If the user is advanced enough, he will be able to go his own way.

Yes I prefer the package manager too, when it works and gives me what I want. But for the software that changes fast, like new languages / compilers, or juggernaut software like Kubernetes, packagers can't keep up and I do not expect them to.

> The existence of packagers is proof that some subset of users "prefer" that software "be deployed and configured" via distro package managers.

Not necessarily. It might be inertia - back when linux distributions started being organised this way, those language dependency management mechanisms pretty much didn't exist.

CPAN exists since 1993, online since 1995. CPAN has the package manager, which is able to install perl software with their dependencies. It's not a new, unknown technology.

If you are sure that you can create functional, stable, bug free, hole free, up to date, full of useful software distro with 10 independent package managers instead of one, then just do it. We will enjoy it. You will spend about 10x more time than current maintainers, but your time is free, so it's not a problem. Of course, we will say huge THANK YOU for your incredible effort, with nine zeroes after initial zero, except for some hatters, which will blame your perfect distro at HN for no reason.

Debian in particular put a fair bit of effort into integrating apt deeply with CPAN so that you could install a package from there that depended on system libraries and vice versa, and then for subsequent languages they... didn't. You'd think these were well-known technologies, but as far as linux distribution maintaners are concerned they're new and scary.

> If you are sure that you can create functional, stable, bug free, hole free, up to date, full of useful software distro with 10 independent package managers instead of one, then just do it.

I'd rather leave the distribution model behind entirely. And you know what? I do, and it works great. You just get the occasional complaint like this article, but it doesn't actually matter in the real world.

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