On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 11:32:32PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> My concern is mostly that you're giving _generally_ bad advice that is
> likely to bite people if/when they keep applying it, and apply it to
> software more interdependent with the rest of the system. If you merely
> said 'Hey, I do this because it's convenient in this case, but you could
> get in trouble if you ignore package management on a package-oriented
> distro in a carefree way as if it didn't matter', I'd be fine with that.
> But instead, your writings (in particular cases) go out of your way to
> _specifically discourage_ people from bothering to use package
> management.
>
> Worse, your essays portray the Linux admin's choice as a dichotomy
> between badly designed distro packages on the one hand and appropriately
> tailored locally compiled tarballs on the other -- as if it were
> impossible to use backports.org packages, unofficial repo packages, or
> locally built packages the admin constructs based on tarball
> compilation.

Hell yeah. I have a completely opposite view: if a piece of software hasn't
been packaged, it's most likely because it is crap -- otherwise someone
would bother to do the work. And, usually upstream developers know how to
deal with the particular problem their software is made for, but have no
idea how to integrate it with the rest of the system.

Most of a packager's work is beating snowflakes into something that's policy
compliant. For example, upstreams tend to think they're exempt from the FHS
because their software is special. Then, you have "convenience" copies of
libraries -- often with a bogus patch rejected by upstream of that library.
Then there's static linking. Or -march=native or -mavx65536vbmi because
that "makes the program faster". Build systems in general are a horror
show -- especially platform detection that thinks it's smarter than the
compiler. Or, config file handling. Or...


You can build from a tarball on your home toy box. It simply doesn't scale
once you try to deploy that onto a bunch of servers -- even within just your
organization. A distribution is far more complex than that.


Meow!
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