No. The package managers of distributions have many disadvantages, the biggest one being the missing support for virtualenvs. Deployment of Python code is so much easier when you completely ignore the distribution’s package mangement. Python Wheels are also cross platform (as long as they’re pure Python packages), Windows and OS X included.
Nix actually solves these problems quite well and even better because it can have packages from any language. It’s a shame that we have developers spending more time on yet another Python package manager (and every language community is doing this, even Ocaml, my preferred language) rather than banding together and using a package manager that solves the problem once and for all for everyon.
I think it’s safe to assume that the effort involved in getting Nix to work on Windows is less than the effort involved in every programming langauge getting its own package manager that has to run on all the same platforms.
But it doesn’t have to be Nix, I just want everything in the same manager.
No. The package managers of distributions have many disadvantages, the biggest one being the missing support for virtualenvs.
This is not a fundamental problem of packaging. It is maybe a problem of those systems (at least deb and rpm) being quite old and far from perfect. That doesn’t mean that packaging has to be solved for each and every single technology (pip, gems, melpa, cpan, ctan, opam, hex, npm, mvn, hackage, … ad infinitum).
All those are versions of each others, and all of those share good things and bad things that are specific to packaging, not languages.
As mentioned repeatedly here in lobsters, it seems to me that nix solves most, if not all, of the issues one can find when using deb or rpm in a generic way. Even if it didn’t I still can’t see a good reason to invest in solving the packaging problem specifically for every language.
The old, non-piracy part of Usenet is the perfect examples why you need some kind of community moderation to scale past a certain size and not drown in spam and useless content. Usenet was a bit too open and that’s what killed it.
Can we please get rid of these language specific package managers??
No. The package managers of distributions have many disadvantages, the biggest one being the missing support for virtualenvs. Deployment of Python code is so much easier when you completely ignore the distribution’s package mangement. Python Wheels are also cross platform (as long as they’re pure Python packages), Windows and OS X included.
Nix actually solves these problems quite well and even better because it can have packages from any language. It’s a shame that we have developers spending more time on yet another Python package manager (and every language community is doing this, even Ocaml, my preferred language) rather than banding together and using a package manager that solves the problem once and for all for everyon.
Nix doesn’t seem to support Windows, so there is one big use case that it doesn’t solve.
I think it’s safe to assume that the effort involved in getting Nix to work on Windows is less than the effort involved in every programming langauge getting its own package manager that has to run on all the same platforms.
But it doesn’t have to be Nix, I just want everything in the same manager.
This is not a fundamental problem of packaging. It is maybe a problem of those systems (at least deb and rpm) being quite old and far from perfect. That doesn’t mean that packaging has to be solved for each and every single technology (pip, gems, melpa, cpan, ctan, opam, hex, npm, mvn, hackage, … ad infinitum).
All those are versions of each others, and all of those share good things and bad things that are specific to packaging, not languages.
As mentioned repeatedly here in lobsters, it seems to me that nix solves most, if not all, of the issues one can find when using deb or rpm in a generic way. Even if it didn’t I still can’t see a good reason to invest in solving the packaging problem specifically for every language.
Hell, I’d settle for not requiring packages at runtime. Preferably not in a way that also has an entire OS tag along.
Would it be reasonable to describe Usenet as “a reddit without servers”?
It’s good to see so much interest coming back into peer-to-peer systems as people become more aware of the problems of centralization.
It’s such a shame Usenet nowadays is only full of spam and pirates.
The old, non-piracy part of Usenet is the perfect examples why you need some kind of community moderation to scale past a certain size and not drown in spam and useless content. Usenet was a bit too open and that’s what killed it.