Hacker News Reader

> Using git as a repository is just nuts. Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk.

Do you mean github? Git is open source and one of the few pieces of software that works in a truly distributed fashion.

> Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk.

Also: what do I care that people store unaudited and insecure stuff in there?

You're right; I meant github. Sorry.

Because cross platform packages isn't a thing, and not everyone wants to create a package for every platform out there.

The reasons language-specific package managers are popular:

1) "npm install" or "go get" or what have you, works on every platform (barring bugs), while "apt install" only works on some.

2) Most platform package managers aren't good at handling multiple versions of dependencies (which, neither are many language package managers, but they're easier to sandbox away with supplemental tools than system package managers are)

3) Most platform package managers lag way behind language-specific package managers, and may also lack tons and tons of packages that are available on those.

> Git is privately-owned

Git... hub, you mean?

Probably because your Debian doesn't work on other Linux distros like CentOS, Arch Linux ..., let alone MacOS and Windows. The holy grail would be a package manager that is both cross language and cross platform at the same time, but it seems too hard to be implemented in general.

Anaconda is probably the closest as it also package many non python packages. Nix is also similar but it doesn't support Windows at all (without WSL)

> Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk. [...] I've been using Debian derivatives for years

Git is owned by the same owner as Linux. If you've been using Debian derivatives for years it seems you must have some trust to give that private entity? Unless the derivative you speak of is Debian GNU/k*BSD?

Furthermore, if you give trust to Debian derivative projects, why not trust their Git builds? If you trust everything else in their distribution Git is a curious omission. Do you have a personal beef with Torvalds or something?

> There's no reason why a package-management system needs to be language-specific; dependencies are often cross-language. Hell, even some blocks of code contain more than one language.

This sounds a lot like a case of https://xkcd.com/927/ . Languages have different ways of importing and installing dependencies, trying to create a package manager over all of those is just going to end up making things even more complex, especially if you target all platforms at once.

> Using git as a repository is just nuts. Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk.

Git is fully open source. Are you confusing Git and GitHub?

> Languages have different ways of importing and installing dependencies

They're not actually different. They call things differently, and they have different methods of passing the required lookup paths/artifacts/sources to their compilers/interpreters/linkers, but in the end all of them are conceptually the same thing.

>but in the end all of them are conceptually the same thing

The concept of a programming language isn't what people use, but the concrete reality of specific implementations on specific hardware.

You could also say that a coffee cup and a donut aren't actually different because they're topologically the same... but the facts on the ground do actually matter.

It absolutely does matter in this case. We have written implementations of this concept for very different languages (Go, Common Lisp, Erlang, C) and the conceptual equality means that nothing is different at the core, only at the edges (where you integrate with each snowflake's particular flavour of "what are the names of the command-line arguments to the compiler" and so on).