Developer-driven software distribution is a bad idea, which is why I dislike things like Flatpak.
Having distro maintainers involved in the process and installing your software from a free software distribution like Debian or FreeBSD is a much better distribution of power. The packages can be tuned to suit their environment without the developer having to repackage it for every distro, and the distro maintainers can keep out anti-features like telemetry and advertising.
The middleman may seem annoying to developers, but embrace the model and it'll work for you. Landing packages in your favorite distro isn't actually that hard, and the rest of the distros will follow. If you're an end-user who wants to see some software available for your distro, look into packaging and volunteer - it's easy.
@sir One of the major features of Flatpak is using container technology to make sure no matter the distro, the package is running in the same environment as the developer's machine, so there is no need to "tune for the environment."
For the anti-feature point, if you have problems with the source, you should fork it, not pretend you are distributing the app while in reality you are distributing something else.
@grainloom @cagatayy nix people are like the homeless guy on the street corner ranting about the clinton administration in 2019
@grainloom @cagatayy oh, shove off, it was a joke. NixOS is for FP elitists, that's why I don't like it. It's way too complicated for way too little gain. I'll take 90% the stability for 10% the complexity any day of the week.
@grainloom @cagatayy only true if you accept the "problems" it solves as such
@grainloom @cagatayy I agree on the first point, but not the second.
@grainloom @cagatayy I am familiar with these package managers, and I stand by considering these things antifeatures
@grainloom @cagatayy on the contrary, the average person doesn't give two shits about these things. To most people, Linux == Ubuntu
@sir @grainloom @cagatayy I'm very much a Guix advocate. We're developing an upstream distribution, based on this (still young), but in my opinion, fantastic package manager. That being said, I have to agree with Drew. For the majority, Linux = Ubuntu. Most people don't care about the technical details, or reproducible environments - nobody would be using Windows, or MacOS if that was the case. People want beautiful, no-brainer software, that helps them accomplish stuff without reading a manual.
- Work out of the box on Windows
- Are installable by non-root in an arbitrary location
I believe that at least one of buck/pants/bazel do this to some extent already today for some languages.
I hope we can one day have a guix-lite that while giving up on some features of full guix can fulfill the above two requirements and make cross-language deps normal rather than fringe, and stop new languages from inventing the 847th wheel.
And, of course, it should fit well with guix-full so that a real guix can benefit from the packaging work done for devs.
@clacke @cagatayy @sir @franz isn't Guix already installable without root?
https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2017/10/using-guix-without-being-root/
@clacke @cagatayy @sir @franz @grainloom RPM is working on rootless support, and there's a port of RPM with DNF to Windows in progress by the Midipix folks. I'm working on bringing it to macOS myself.
I hope Windows doesn't become a usable development platform before most of the devs have moved to Linux already.
@franz @sir @cagatayy I kinda agree with this but if someone's doing web development and have already installed a language specific package manager, then using Guix or Nix shouldn't be that hard for them and if they wanna distribute things with Flatpak and absolutely refuse to write a proper package instead, then I'd prefer guix pack instead of a blob that who knows what generated.