I don't care about software packagers at all, except insofar as they can address the needs of users.
> The solution to having inconsistent packaging paths isn't to introduce _yet another_ packaging path system, but this one specific to djb stuff. It's to use a standard build system with overrideable paths, and not to assume the author knows better than the packager.
Having "inconsistent packaging paths" isn't the problem. The problem is I have a program called "foo" and I don't know if it should begin with:
#!/usr/local/bin/python
or:
#!/usr/bin/python
Somebody who doesn't have a real job made the joke that it should "obviously" use "overridable paths" like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
but that person hasn't used very many unix systems so they're unaware that this doesn't work on some systems. Eventually the "package manager" compromised with:
#!/bin/sh
''':'
if type python2 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null; then
exec python2 "$0" "$@"
else
exec python "$0" "$@"
fi
'''
And users are like "what the fuck!?" All we needed to agree was that python "lives" in /usr/local/bin/python and python3 (an incompatible alternative to python) lives someplace else, we would have been fine.
And for what? Why did we bother with this? What did we actually gain for all this extra shit? Some package manager felt like he was doing the job of a tarball?
> They don't address cross-compilation at all, or the needs of software packagers.
Cross-compilation is tricky for programs that need to run programs to figure out how they need to be built; neither cmake or GNU autoconf do anything to address it.
The best solution package managers seem to suggest is to "not do that" but those programs are slow.
You example script with python2 is not about pathing, but a separate problem or multiple binaries with the same name, and is exactly why you want to let package managers deal with this.
As a developer, you can't know all the different setups you users will have, or for example what the default python will be. As a package manager, you know Exactly this for the systems you are packaging for. If needed, they will patch your library to fix the python binary name, or supply the correct build arg if you support it. It's their job to make sure all the users in their little slice of the Linux ecosystem can install and use your software reliably and easily, so working against them is user hostile, and using example of exactly the problems they solve as evidence for why we shouldn't make their lives easier makes no sense.
> You example script with python2 is not about pathing, but a separate problem or multiple binaries with the same name, and is exactly why you want to let package managers deal with this.
> for example what the default python will be
Except that package maintainers created this problem. It's not a real problem!
Some package managers decided to call it "python" creating the incompatibility, and thus creating the problem for everyone who writes python programs for now until all those systems go away.
As a result, everyone who wants to write python programs has to deal with the fact that python is sometimes called python and sometimes called python2 -- depending on what the package manager did.
> As a developer, you can't know all the different setups you users will have,
> Except that package maintainers created this problem. It's not a real problem!
It is a real problem. People wanted both python interpreters installed at the same time, and a way for software written for each of them to functionally coexist on a system. Package maintainers provided a solution.
> Some package managers decided to call it "python" creating the incompatibility, and thus creating the problem for everyone who writes python programs for now until all those systems go away.
Did they create the problem, or did they mirror the reality they saw, where people that installed python3 symlinked python to python3?
Here's a little tidbit from the last few lines of output of "make install" from Python 3.0:
* Note: not installed as 'python'.
* Use 'make fullinstall' to install as 'python'.
* However, 'make fullinstall' is discouraged,
* as it will clobber your Python 2.x installation.
To me, the implication is that python hasn't been fully installed because it was worried about python 2 and didn't want to inconvenience you, but hey, if you don't have python 2.x to worry about, or have dealt with the problem otherwise (which is something package managers would attempt to do), then you can do a fullinstall.
I think it's pretty obvious from this that the Python developers intended to completely replace python 2.x, and take over the "python" binary namespace as well.
But sure, you can go ahead and blame this on package managers. Why let a little thing like trivially discoverable information that casts doubt on your argument get in the way of a good rant?
> or did they mirror the reality they saw, where people that installed python3 symlinked python to python3?
Evidence please.
I can’t believe any user would do this because it instantly breaks all their scripts.
Every python 3 program I have thinks python 3 is #!/usr/bin/python3
> I think it's pretty obvious from this that the Python developers intended to completely replace python 2.x
Of course they did, but there’s a good reason there are no directions for installing Python on the python website tell users to do this: As naive and full of hope as the python developers are, they’ve got nothing on the sheer hubris of Linux python packagers who think they’re doing gods work by commenting out random seeds in OpenSSL.
> I can’t believe any user would do this because it instantly breaks all their scripts.
You mean those scripts which they are expected to upgrade to Python 3 using the 2to3 program, which installs with python? The same scripts that Python 3 advocates claim can be fairly easily converted?
> Evidence please
The fact that Python 3 has a documented option to install as /usr/bin/python and it mentions it on every regular install is evidence.
> Every python 3 program I have thinks python 3 is #!/usr/bin/python3
But did they initially? That's the question. We're talking about decisions package managers made years ago, so the status of Python 2 and Python 3 at at that time is what we need to look at.
Also, it's important to note, this isn't the first time this has happened. I remember having lots of problems trying to get Python 2 installed on systems that shipped with Python 1. It's entirely possible that the solution to this problem is from when that happened, and rather than rather than come up with a different, Python2 -> Python3 solution they used what was decided at the point they had to support both Python1 and Python2, so the solution be familiar. That's got a fair chance of being likely, since package managers are working on systems on timeframes much longer than the vast majority of system administrators, but still need to support those admins that are managing systems a decade after install.[1]
> As naive and full of hope as the python developers are, they’ve got nothing on the sheer hubris of Linux python packagers who think they’re doing gods work by commenting out random seeds in OpenSSL.
I'm not really interested in enumerating all the logical fallacies you're falling back on here. That, combined with your denigrating characterization of entire groups of people doesn't really lend itself towards my idea of a useful or constructive conversation, so I think I'm done. Feel free to reply, I'll read it, but I won't be continuing this discussion.
> The fact that Python 3 has a documented option to install as /usr/bin/python and it mentions it on every regular install is evidence.
No it's not.
Finding a debian mailing list where someone is complaining about incorporating a python3 script "package" that assumes python is /usr/bin/python would be a start. Finding many people complaining would be evidence.
> I remember having lots of problems trying to get Python 2 installed on systems that shipped with Python 1.
Problems created by package maintainers "shipping" python in the first place.
Let's say I'm writing firmware for a TV. Why wouldn't I want to use the chip's CPU to the fullest extent at runtime? That doesn't mean I want to compile my TV firmware _on_ the TV.
> Why wouldn't I want to use the chip's CPU to the fullest extent at runtime?
Because you'd rather use GNU autoconf?
If you wanted the fastest possible performance, you'd try each algorithm, profile them, then select the one that works best. This build process can do that automatically. GNU autoconf cannot.
You can tell autoconf which to use, but the package maintainer can't be trusted to do this.
Then the user will just complain that it's not that much faster than qsort.
The package maintainer would be to blame for users thinking this was slow software simply because they chose poor defaults, and nobody would ever know...
> If you wanted the fastest possible performance, you'd try each algorithm, profile them, then select the one that works best. This build process can do that automatically. GNU autoconf cannot.
Except doing it at build time is a terrible idea anyway. That is because the set of CPUs it will be used on is actually unknown, unless it's literally not meant for anyone else to use that compiled object. But that's not how people actually develop at all. They distribute the software objects and users link against it on their CPUs, which the original build system cannot possibly have knowledge of.
Requiring AVX2 or whatever by default really has nothing to do with this. High speed software that's actually usable for developers and users selects appropriate algorithms at runtime based on the characteristics of the actual machine they run on (for example, Ryzen vs Skylake, which have different throughput and cycle characteristics.) This is the only meaningful way to do it unless you literally only care about ever deploying to one machine, or you just don't give a shit about usability.
You could absolutely write an Autoconf script that runs those tests by default, but has overrideable behavior. You can make custom Autoconf macros to detect whatever arbitrary thing you want. At the core, an Autoconf macro is just a chunk of shell script that sets some environment variables with the result.
They address the needs of users.
I don't care about software packagers at all, except insofar as they can address the needs of users.
> The solution to having inconsistent packaging paths isn't to introduce _yet another_ packaging path system, but this one specific to djb stuff. It's to use a standard build system with overrideable paths, and not to assume the author knows better than the packager.
Having "inconsistent packaging paths" isn't the problem. The problem is I have a program called "foo" and I don't know if it should begin with:
or: Somebody who doesn't have a real job made the joke that it should "obviously" use "overridable paths" like this: but that person hasn't used very many unix systems so they're unaware that this doesn't work on some systems. Eventually the "package manager" compromised with: And users are like "what the fuck!?" All we needed to agree was that python "lives" in /usr/local/bin/python and python3 (an incompatible alternative to python) lives someplace else, we would have been fine.And for what? Why did we bother with this? What did we actually gain for all this extra shit? Some package manager felt like he was doing the job of a tarball?
> They don't address cross-compilation at all, or the needs of software packagers.
Cross-compilation is tricky for programs that need to run programs to figure out how they need to be built; neither cmake or GNU autoconf do anything to address it.
The best solution package managers seem to suggest is to "not do that" but those programs are slow.