Reply to post: Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

[Author here]

> What's wrong with a tarball that includes all the dependencies?

Lots. How long have you got?

* What keeps track of what it puts where?

* How do you keep track of what depends on it?

* How do you know what it depends upon?

* How do you upgrade it if you don't know what it put, where?

* How do you uninstall it?

* How do you keep it online and know where to find it, so a million client machines or instances can fetch it when they need it?

There are good solid reasons why package management systems were invented. They fulfil a need.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/linux_software_installation/

The real question is not "why do we have them?" (which is easy) or "can we do better?" (which is contentious but manifestly defensible).

The real question that's *not* being asked is: was the original way of doing this on xNix the right way to do it? What alternatives are there, and what are their pros and cons? And if we decide that we didn't do it the right way in the 1970s -- and I personally feel we did not -- then what is the better way of doing it and how do we get there from here?

The Nix and Guix way of doing things has some strong advantages but it also has major drawbacks.

Me, personally, I like the GoboLinux way of doing things. I reckon that could be amenable to being enhanced a bit so that it could be automated, and we could have the best of both worlds: an automatic declarative way of managing software (like Nix) but also a human-readable, navigable filesystem.

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