I once asked on LQ why on earth we somehow still can’t just settle on one fucking packaging format.
That was literally the point of AppImage and then Canonical/Red Hat decided they needed to do Snaps and Flatpak. It makes no fucking sense to have all 3 of these things when the whole point was that there would be ONE fucking format that could be run on any distro. That was the whole point.
Couldn’t even do that right. FFS
Well great news, the world has mostly settled on Flatpak now.
They all have advantages and disadvantages in certain conditions. While others are around for two decades already and got a new wrapper around the existing one all 10 years or so.
Just give the source away. Don’t package it at all (or at most, do so for your own distro). If your software is good enough, others will do the packaging for you. You’ll have to field a few inquiries, maybe, until someone steps up, but if you’ve got a canned response already written those don’t take long to handle.
This dev’s problems are twofold: first, he’s in too much of a hurry to get this thing out everywhere, instead of waiting for others to take the burden off him. Second, he wrote his code in Rust, which is difficult to package correctly in a self-contained manner because it tries to force you into using its own language-specific dependency system. He picked up a footgun and shot himself with it, in other words, and is now hopping around cursing.
Just give the source away. Don’t package it at all (or at most, do so for your own distro). If your software is good enough, others will do the packaging for you.
As someone who’s developed and shipped software you may know, who’s worked in rel/eng, OS security, escalations (we research the fix for the sploit and build the artifact for the update pipeline; everyone calls it something else) before being just an admin to manage hordes of machines; with the knowledge gained in every post I’ve ever held, let me say:
THIS. ABSOLUTELY THIS.
If you are a great coder but suck at packaging or hate it, then don’t. You’d produce something sub-par anyway.
Let the knowledgeable enthusiastic obsessively-detailed people do it for you and you’ll be happier and so will they.
He picked up a footgun and shot himself with it,
But I thought rust was 100% safe and the best? /s
There’s nothing wrong with the language that I’m aware of, but some aspects of the ecosystem seem to have not been thought out with Linux packaging in mind, let’s say.
some aspects of the ecosystem seem to have not been thought out
Absolutely. But this is a natural effect of ditching mentors and documentors more than 20 years ago – coders now have no idea in general how to do supply-chains right; nor why.
I’m just making fun of the people who treat rust like the next best thing after sliced bread and pretend it will make it so you have 0 bugs.
Well, that sounds really immature.
Their behaviour or me making fun of them?
Yes
No automatic updates for .deb / .rpm
The author seems to have completely missed the point that they can just publish their own repositories to allow users on both of these platforms to update. It would also mean they could avoid the problems they’re having building source packages.
Their complaints about supporting instalations with older libc versions are also addressable by just building against the oldest libc they wish to support.
I know right? This is literally what flat pack was meant to address. Just package has push it and let any system use it. So it is a little more complicated and another step on top of everything.
This is literally what flat pack was meant to address. Just package has push it and let any system use it. So it is a little more complicated and another step on top of everything.
Flatpak is absolutely terrible. As a second repository, it breaks source of truth, doesn’t share dependency or SBOM data with the system and at worst begs for dependency hell.
At best it’s XKCD 927.
i guess the problem with that is having to maintain the repository setup. they’re basically web servers with signed files.
That does solve one problem at the cost of a bunch of other potential problems.
I don’t see the problem. For years I’ve used the public Open Build Service instance at openSUSE to package and publish software for openSUSE and Fedora (never cared for Debian/Ubuntu because I packaged the software only for my own use but it’s possible).
You can put the repositories on pretty much any static hosting. I haven’t tried it, but I’m pretty sure that, with a bit of fiddling, you could even put them on a github pages site.
Both distros have good tooling for maintaining repositories, and I’d say it’s probably easier than getting your package into the official repos and keeping it updated there, especially on distros like Debian which favour stability over having the latest versions of packages.
No distribution system is going to be entirely friction free for the author, but I’ve not encountered any significant issues hosting deb or rpm repos.
I’m pretty sure that, with a bit of fiddling, you could even put them on a github pages site.
Harbottle does this. It’s very well-done.
that defeats the purpose of a package managerthat defeats the purpose of a package manager
I suspect you’re confusing the package manager with the supply chain. This should always be separate, lest we get some systemd-like spongiform blob with no ability to swap out and improve parts without discarding the whole.
Unless you’re Lennart, it’s a bad idea.
I love how he literally packages for any system EXCEPT snap
