this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Well yeah ... the native package manager. Has the bonus of the installed files being tracked.
And often official package maintainers are a lot more security conscious about how packages are built as well.
I agree.
On the other hand, as a software author, your options are: spend a lot of time maintaining packages for Arch, Alpine, Void, Nix, Gentoo, Gobo, RPM, Debian, and however many other distro package managers; or wait for someone else to do it, which will often be "never".
The non-rolling distros can take a year to update a package, even if they decide to include it.
Honestly, it's a mess, and I think we're in that awkward state Linux was in when everyone seemed to collectively realize sysv init sucks, and you saw dinit, runit, OpenRC, s6, systemd, upstart, and initng popping up - although, many of these were started after systemd; it's just for illustration. Most distributions settled on systemd, for better or worse. Now we see something similar: the profusion of package managers really is a Problem, and people are trying to address it with solutions like Snap, AppImages, and Flatpack.
As a software developer, I'd like to see distros standardize on a package manager, but on the other hand, I really dislike systemd and feel as if everyone settling on the wrong package manager (cough Snap) would be worse than the current chaos. I don't know if they're mutually exclusive objectives.
For my money, I'd go with pacman. It's easy to write PKGBUILDs and to get packages into AUR, but requires users to intentionally use AUR. I wish it had a better migration process (AUR packages promoted to community, for instance). It's fairly trivial for a distribution to "pin" releases so that users aren't using a rolling upgrade.
Alpine's is also good nice, and they have a really decent, clearly defined migration path from testing to community; but the barrier for entry to get packages in is harder, and clearly requires much more work by a community of volunteers, and it can occasionally be frustrating for everyone: for us contributors who only interact with the process a couple of time a year, it's easy to forget how they require things to be run, causing more work for reviewers; and sometimes an MR will just languish until someone has time to review it. There are some real heroes over there doing some heavy lifting.
I'm about to go on a journey for contribution to Void, which I expect to be similar to Alpine.
Redhat and deb? All I can do is build packages for them and host them myself, and hope users can figure out how to find and install stuff without it being in The Official Repos.
Oh, Nix. I tried, but the package definitions are a nightmare and just being enough of Nix on your computer to where you can test and submit builds takes GB of disk space. I actively dislike working with Nix. GUIX is nearly as bad. I used to like Lisp - it's certainly an interesting and educational tool - but I've really started to object to more and more as I encounter it in projects like Nyxt and GUIX, where you're forced to use it if you want to do any customization.
But this is the world of OSS: you either labor in obscurity; or you self-promote your software - which I hate: if I wanted to do marketing, I'd be in marketing. Or you hope enough users in enough distributions volunteer to manage packages for their distros that people can get to it. And you still have to address the issue of making it easy for people to use your software.
curl <URL> | shis, frankly, a really elegant, easy solution for software developers... of only it weren't for the fact that the world is full of shitty, unethical people forcing us to distrust each other.It's all sub-optimal, and needs a solution. I'm not convinced the various containerizations are the right direction; does "rg" really need to be run in a container? Maybe it makes sense for big suites with a lot of dependencies, like Gimp, but even so, what's the solution for the vast majority of OSS software which are just little CLI or TUI tools?
Distributions aren't going to standardize on Arch's APKBUILD, or Alpine's almost identical but just slightly different enough to not be compatible PKGBUILD; and Snap, AppImage, and Flatpack don't seem to be gaining broad traction. I'm starting to think something like a yay that installs into $HOME. Most systems are single user, anyway; something that leverages Arch's huge package repository(s), but can be used by any user regardless of distribution. I know Nix can be used like this, but then, it's Nix, so I'd rather not.
There is a reason why they do this. For stable release distros, particularly Debian, they refuse to update packages beyond fixing vulnerabilities as part of a way to ensure that the system changes minimally. This means that for example, if a software depends on a library, it will stay working for the lifecycle of a stable release. Sometimes latest isn't the greatest.
You swapped PKBUILD and APKBUILD 🙃
Homebrew, in theory, could do this. But they insist on creating a separate user and installing to that user's home directory
Of course. It also prevents people from getting all improvements that aren't security. It's especially bad for software engineers who are developing applications that need on a non-security big fix or new feature. It's fine if all you need is a box that's going to run the same version of some software, sitting forgotten in a closet that gets walled in some day. IMO, it's a crappy system for anything else.
I did! I've been trying to update packages in both, recently. The similarities are utterly frustrating, as they're almost identical; the biggest difference between Alpine and Arch is the package process. If they were the same format - and they're honestly so close it's absurd - it'd make packager's lives easier.
I may have mentioned I haven't yet started Void, but I expect it to be similarly frustrating: so very, very similar.
Yeah, I got to thinking about this more after I posted, and it's a horrible idea. It'd guarantee system updates break user installs, and the only way it couldn't were if system installs knew about user installs and also updated those, which would defeat the whole purpose.
So you end up back with containers, or AppImages, Snap, or Flatpack. Although, of all of these, AppImages and podman are the most sane, since Snap and Flatpack are designed to manage system-level software, which isn't much of am issue.
It all drives me back to the realization that the best solution is statically compiled binaries, as produced by Go, Rust, Zig, Nim, V. I'd include C, but the temptation to dynamically link is so ingrained in C - I rarely see really statically linked C projects.
As an Arch user, yeah, PKGBUILDs are a very good solution, at least for specifically Arch Linux (or other distros having the same directory-tree best practices). I have implemented a dozen or so projects in PKGBUILDs, and 150 or so from the AUR. It gives users a very easy way to essentially manually install yet control stuff. And you can just put it into the AUR, so other users can either just use it, or first read through, understand, maybe adapt and then use it. It shows that there is no need for packages to solely be either the authors, nor the distro maintainers responsibility.