As someone who runs a Linux distribution, please don't vendor your dependencies for the benefit of distribution maintainers, it makes it much more difficult to build a coherent system. Running different versions of common libraries causes real annoyances.
It's a double-edged sword, though. I find that with Debian I often can't have up-to-date versions of programs I care about, because some program that nobody cares about won't build against an upgraded library version that they mutually depend on.
The requirement that every binary on the system depend on the same shared library basically led to things like app stores and Snap, which I think we can all agree that nobody wants.
Yeah, and I get my free ride by just downloading the binary from the project's website. Linux distributions add a bunch of arbitrary rules that I don't care about and that don't help me.
Yes this can't be emphasized enough. static linking is fine, I don't really care either way. But please, please don't vendor.
The point of software is to be composable, and vendoring kills that. Vendoring will cause free software to drown in its own complexity and is completely irresponsible.
It's one a package contains it's dependencies, and often their dependencies too (transitive deps).'
packages are supposed to be nodes in a dependency graph (or better, partial order), and there are nice composition rules. But one the nodes themselves represent graph/order closures (or almost-closure) we use that nice property.
People that are very application oriented tend to like vendoring --- "my application is its own island, who gives a shit". But the distro's point isn't just gather the software --- that's an anachronism --- but plan a coherent whole. And applications who only care about themselves are terrible for that.
The larger point is free and open source software really should be library-first. Siloed Applicationns are a terrible UI and holdover from the economics of proprietary shrink-wrapped software which itself is a skeuomorphism from the physical world of nonreplicable goods.
> Siloed Applicationns are a terrible UI and holdover from the economics of proprietary shrink-wrapped software which itself is a skeuomorphism from the physical world of nonreplicable goods
Siloed applications are UI neutral and represent decoupling, which enables progress and resilience. Excessive interdependence is how you lose Google Reader because other services have changed requirements.
What? Getting rid of Google Reader was a business decision.
> Siloed applications are UI neutral and represent decoupling, which enables progress and resilience.
The medieval manorial economy is resilient. Is that progress?
What happened to unified look and feel? and rich interactions between widgets? The smalltalk and Oberon GUI visions? All that requires more integration.
I get that we need to make the here and no work, but that is done via the en-mass translation of language-specific package manager packages to distro packages (static or shared, don't care), not vendoring.
> What? Getting rid of Google Reader was a business decision
It has been widely reported that a significant factor in that business decisions was Google’s massively coupled codebase and the fact that Reader had dependencies on parts of it that were going to have breaking changes to support other services.
> The medieval manorial economy is resilient.
It’s not, compared to capitalist and modern mixed economies, and unnecessary and counterproductive coupling between unrelated functions is a problem there, too.
> Is that progress?
Compared to its immediate precedents, generally, yes.
Fewer and fewer people are interested in the benefits provided by "coherent whole" distributions. And more and more people are interested in the benefits provided by "it's own island" applications.
The future is statically linked and isolated applications. Distros need to adapt.
1. Have the users been asking for everything to be a laggy electron app? I don't think so.
2. Within these apps are languages based package managers that don't encorage vendoring, it's just one people go to package for distros that they vendor away. Distros do need to make it easier to automatically convert language-specific package manager apps.
The future is making development builds and production builds not wildly different, and both super incremental, so one can easily edit any dependency not matter how deep and then put their system back to together.
Again, I am fine with static linking. My distro, NixOS is actually great at that and I've helped work on it. But vendoring ruins everything. I hate waiting for everyone to build the same shit over and over again with no instrumentality, and I don't have time to reverse-engineer whatever special snowflake incremental dev build setup each package uses.
The number of people who consider the system/distribution the atomic unit rather than the application, is probably about equal to the number of people who "edit dependencies and put their system back together" -- they are in total statistically zero. The overriding concern is the user need for a working application. Everything else is a distant secondary concern.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything, here, I'm just describing the facts on the ground. If you're not into them, that's fine!
The number of people who have a "theory of distribution" one way or the other is pretty low.
But
- many people seem to like unified look and feel
- many people complain about per-app auto-update
- many people love to complain software is getting worse
Are these people connecting these complaints to the debate we're having? Probably not. Can these views be connected to that? Absolutely.
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I work on distros and due edit the root dependencies, I also contribute to many libraries I use at work during work, finally, I use the same distro at work on on my own and everything is packaged the same way. So yes, it's a "unified workflow for yak shaves" and I quite like it.
I hope there can be more people like me if this stuff weren't so obnoxiously difficult.
Yeah, sorry, I saw that later. (May have seen it earlier too, but not connected it to your name as I was replying.)
But that still doesn't make my comment a strawman (because I was talking about this one specific comment), or AFAICS yours less of one: Why would you jump to "bloated Electron apps"? Sure, they may suck, but the comment you replied to was about statically linked apps; no mention of Electron at all. Unless you're saying there was, originally, and had been edited out before I saw it? If not, your reply was... OK, more charitably, at least a non sequitur.
The "coherent whole" is more in demand than ever before. Just look at the Android and iOS ecosystems with super hard rules how things have to behave and look in order to be admitted. They just put the burden on the app dev instead of a crew of distro maintainers.
If you define "demand" as hard orders from the warden of your walled garden, yes. But that's not how the concept is normally used.
Personally, for instance, I'd have been perfectly happy if at least a few apps had stayed with the Android UI of a few versions back[1], before they went all flat and gesture-based. There was no demand from me, as a consumer, to imitate Apple's UI.
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[1]: And no, that's not outmoded "skeumorphism". That concept means "imitation of physical objects", like that shell on top of Windows that was a picture of a room, with a picture of a Rolodex on top of a dedktop etc etc. In the decades since ~1985 a separate visual grammar had developed, where a gray rounded rectangle with "highlights" on the upper and left edges, "shadows" on the lower and right edges, and text in the middle meant "button" in the sense of "click here to perform an action", not any more in the original skeumorphic sense of "this is a picture of a bit of a 1980s stereo receiver".
> packages are supposed to be nodes in a dependency graph (or better, partial order), and there are nice composition rules. But one the nodes themselves represent graph/order closures (or almost-closure) we use that nice property.
A) "Lose", not "use", right?
B) Sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook... Who cares about this?
C) Why should I?
> People that are very application oriented tend to like vendoring --- "my application is its own island, who gives a shit".
No, people that are very application oriented tend to like applications that work without a lot of faffing around with "dependencies" and shit they may not even know what it means.
> But the distro's point isn't just gather the software --- that's an anachronism --- but plan a coherent whole.
A) Sez who?
B) Seems to me it would be both easier and more robust to build "a coherent whole" from bits that each work on their own than from ones that depend on each other and further other ones in some (huge bunch of) complex relationship(s).
> And applications who only care about themselves are terrible for that.
As per point B) above, seems to me it's exactly the other way around.
> The larger point is free and open source software really should be library-first.
Again, sez who?
> Siloed Applicationns are a terrible UI
WTF does the UI have to do with anything?
> and holdover from the economics of proprietary shrink-wrapped software
[Citation needed]
> which itself is a skeuomorphism from the physical world of nonreplicable goods.
Shrink-wrapped diskettes or CDs are physical goods, so they can't be skeumorphic.
That's easy to say, but sometimes I need to fix bugs in downstream packages, and I am not willing to wait for 6 months (or forever in some cases) for a fix to be released.
Then Linux distro a year out my patched censored version and link to the buggy upstream, and I have to keep telling bug reporters to not use the distro version.
A useful thing to do when forking software is to give it a new name, to make it clear that it's a separate thing. It sounds like you copied some specific version of software you depend on, then forked it, but left the name the same -- which caused confusion by package builders at the distribution since it's a bit of work to determine if you forked the dependency or are just including it for non-distribution user's convenience.
