Re: Go (golang) packaging, part 2
On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 12:38:16PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I hope that's not generally true, because that would be horribly
> depressing. I don't believe that's true of the Perl community in general.
> It's certainly not true of the C or Java community!
Not all C libraries are distributed from one central site and they
certainly don't expect you to use a central package installation system.
I personally consider Java a bad joke that won't go away.
> Speak for yourself. I've been a system administrator for twenty years,
> and sometimes I have to deploy bleeding-edge code in order to accomplish a
> particular task. You can do that in ways that also give you a
> reproducible system.
If I want something updated that is newer than what debian provides,
then I will make the .deb myself. I want everything consistently
installed.
> Using Debian packages is a *means*, not an *end*. Sometimes in these
> discussions I think people lose sight of the fact that, at the end of the
> day, the goal is not to construct an elegantly consistent system composed
> of theoretically pure components. That's a *preference*, but there's
> something that system is supposed to be *doing*, and we will do what we
> need to do in order to make the system functional.
I like my system to stay working and maintainable. I still have one
system that was installed with Debian 2.1, and upgraded ever since and
is still doing fine. You don't generally get there by taking shortcuts
that seem convinient now, even though long term they are a bad idea.
I very much find doing it right to begin with saves a lot of hassle and
time in the long run. Avoiding trying to circumvent dpkg and apt is
the best way to do that. dpkg and apt help you more than any other
packaging system I have ever seen. No point trying to bypass them.
> Different solutions have different tradeoffs. Obviously, I think Debian
> packages are in a particularly sweet spot among those tradeoffs or I
> wouldn't invest this much time in Debian, but they aren't perfect. There
> are still tradeoffs. (For example, Debian packages are often useless for
> research computing environments where it is absolutely mandatory that
> multiple versions of any given piece of software be co-installable and
> user-choosable.)
Making a debian package is generally very easy, so if you need something
on your system, make a package for it. Now it's simple to deploy to
many systems.
> Indeed. But it's a tradeoff. One frequently does not have the luxury of
> appending to this paragraph "...and therefore I will never install
> anything with a different package manager." Sometimes it's the most
> expedient way of getting something done. Sometimes people aren't as deft
> with turning unpackaged software into Debian packages as you and I are.
But it's so easy (not like rpm and such, which tend to be more work).
For cpan there is even dh-make-perl. The solution then is to make
equivelant scripts for other languages. The solution is NOT to use some
other package installation system.
--
Len Sorensen
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