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How about we just stop putting applications in containers and let the distro manage the fucking packages like we’re supposed to.
@mos_8502 I have feelings and some of the feelings are that everyone screwed this up, for actually natural reasons. I don't think any distro solved the 'how do we let people easily build and deploy software on us' problem, and so programmers do what programmers do and built themselves another layer of indirection to solve their immediate problem.
(I mean, ship an entire container running a web server to do what you could do with a CGI or some PHP files or ... this is my face, etc.)
@mos_8502 "Docker is just static linking for millennials." – a quote I saw somewhere.
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@mos_8502 although I agree. The total mess that was made of python modules in debian derived linuces* does not bode well for distros managing this well.
* many modules missing or being really ancient versions leading to circular dependencies. This is compounded with a wildly random naming standard for the packages.
@tautology @mos_8502 rust similarly. I've pretty much accepted docker as a necessary evil, though podman feels like a cleaner implementation. My slow adoption of NixOS has made me realise there's a third, much better, approach, though :)
@mos_8502 I dislike containers. The minimalistic principles and automation I like.
Some thoughts on this from 2016: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/06/threads.html#00287 in the snappy thread.
I remember one vocal Debian dev (former DPL?) starting a derivative (between 2002-2007 I think) who was advocating for separate dependency chains being maintained for different packages.
One problem is getting reverse dependencies to agree on a single dependency version. This has held up several Debian releases.
@drewdaniels @mos_8502 "separate dependency chains being maintained for different packages" .. adopting nix (if not actually nixos) might be simpler :)
@cks @mos_8502 I do feel a desire for something like an explicitly user-level packaging tool, something like a .deb file that I could apt-get *without* root privileges and that carefully installs things strictly under my ~/
Because that does not exist, I've gradually learned how to do it myself by building things from source with alternative paths, and it usually¹ works well (¹: looking disapprovingly at you, mu/mu4e), but the learning curve is steep and long. Users deserve something easier.