I'm really not sure where to bring this up, but this seems like as good
a place as any, as it's been looking for alternatives to Debian that has
flagged this issue for me (other suggestions welcome).


In looking at Devuan, and a few other non-systemd distros (Gentoo,
FreeBSD, GUIXSD in particular), I've noticed that documentation of how
to install and manage unpackaged software seems to have almost
disappeared. An awful lot of distros now seem to assume that EVERYTHING
is packaged.

Of course, the reverse is far more common - at least that's been my
experience.

- developers tend to distribute source, built in their language-specific
development environment, "packaged" for cross-platform building (e.g., a
.tar file created using gnu autotools), or a .jar file, or what have you
-- (well constructed) source generally compiles, installs, and runs
cleanly [parenthetically, assuming an init system that recognizes
sysvinit files!]

- it's pretty rare for developers to package for more than a few,
particularly popular distros (if they package at all).

- when building production servers, it's a lot more reliable to
"./config; make; make install" than to rely on packages (yes, for a lot
of the platform stuff, packages save time, but as one goes up the stack,
current packages are less common)

- an awful lot of stuff uses its own dependency resolution mechanisms
and repositories (e.g., perl w/ cpan)

Somehow, I think this is something we need to be concerned about for
Devuan; but that also seems of concern to the broader Linux (and Unix?)
ecosystem.

Comments, thoughts?

Miles Fidelman




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra