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0 points__MatrixMan__1y ago0 comments

15y ago I was using apt-get to manage my c++ dependencies with no way of keeping track of which dependency went with which project. It was indeed pretty awful.

Now when I cd into a project, direnv + nix notices the dependencies that that project needs and makes them available, whatever their language. When I cd into a different project, I get an entirely different set of dependencies. There's pretty much nothing installed with system scope. Just a shell and an editor.

Both of these are language agnostic, but the level of encapsulation is quite different and one is much better than that other. (There are still plenty of problems, but they can be fixed with a commit instead of a change of habit.)

The idea that every language needs a different package manager and that each of those needs to package everything that might my useful when called from that language whether or not it is written in that language... It just doesn't scale.

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pletnes1y ago

Valid points. I was also thinking about apt install-ing some C library, try to pip install a package, have it fail to build, look for headers/debug packages in apt, set LD_LIBRARY… you know. It hurts, a lot.

And yet, python is a fantastic language because it’s the remote control to do the heavy, complex, low-level, high-performance stuff with relative ease.

__MatrixMan__OP1y ago

I agree. I want to help save python from its packaging problems because it has so much traction out there (for good reason). People in this forum might be ok jumping ship to rust or whatever but most python users are students, scientists, business types... They're not going to learn rust and I don't think we benefit from leaving them behind.

I wish there was a standard interface that tools like pip could use to express their non-python needs such that some other tool can meet those needs and then hand the baton back to pip once they are met. Poetry2nix is an example of such a collaboration. (I'm not trying to be a nix maximalist here, it's just that it's familiar).

The python community is large enough to attempt to go it alone, but many other language communities are not. I think we'd see faster language evolution if we asked less of them from a packaging perspective:

> focus on making the language great. Provide a way to package deps in that language, and use _____ to ask for everything else.

Apt and brew and snap and whatever else (docker? K8s?) could be taught to handle such requests in a non alter-your-whole-system kind of way.

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