[OT] Weaknesses of distro package managers - was Re: Python 2 to 3 conversion - embrace the pain

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> But after 20 years, the package manager idea certain has revealed many
> shortcomings (in short, it sucks in many ways).  Package managers work
> great for setting up the core distro, and also if the packages you need
> are in the repos.  Distros like RHEL and Debian tend to have long-term
> stability at the expense of not having recent versions of programs and
> libraries.
>

AIUI, your main beef with the packaging system is, as you rightly
note, an inherent conflict between stability and currency. Very true.
RHEL especially, Debian to a somewhat lesser extent, and every OS that
has a curated package system, will run into that problem.

But the solution isn't necessarily to throw out the packaging system.
All you need is to expand it. I don't know how you do it with yum, but
with apt, you simply add something to /etc/apt/sources.list (or the .d
directory), grab your index files, and install. That's how I install
PostgreSQL on Debian Wheezy; the Debian repos ship Postgres 9.1, but
by simply adding the apt.postgresql.org repo, I can grab 9.4 using the
exact same system. Ubuntu's PPA system achieves the same thing, as
mentioned, but even without PPAs, you can still have multiple
repositories.

The hardest part is managing library versions, and that's always going
to be a problem. Sometimes the latest version of an application
demands a newer version of a library than you have, and if you upgrade
that library, you might need to upgrade a whole lot else, too, so you
may as well upgrade everything and call it a new version of the
distro.

The versioning problem is just as much an issue no matter how you try
to cope with it. Package managers can't magically solve everything,
but they can make a lot of jobs easier, so on that basis, I say
they're beneficial. We don't need a 100% solution to be able to make
use of a 90% solution.

ChrisA