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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

Yes, exactly this. Only I view it from the other way round: to try to do development with distro-supplied language packages is a category error.

Distro-supplied interpreters and their associated libraries are there for the applications supplied and supported by the distribution. Unless you are developing something to be part of the distro, they are not for you.

Do not let the distro get between you and your libraries. Supply your own.

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>Unless you are developing something to be part of the distro, they are not for you.

. . . forgetting the original purpose and mindset behind Linux in the first place. From a 1990's point of view; it was always intended to be a hobbyist OS; and in most cases, one had to compile all the binaries and kernel one's self.

There was no such thing, really, as a "user" or "admin" - everyone was considered, and expected to be a developer.

Yes, and distributions arose to solve the problem that plagued early Linux: how to have a set of applications and libraries with consistent and mutually compatible versions of everything. If you're compiling everything yourself, building it so it all works once is an achievement. Keeping on top of as many moving targets as there are binaries in the system so that everything keeps working over time is not practical once the number of moving parts gets high enough.

Distros solve a real problem, but the trade-off is that some parts of the system must exist to serve itself.

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