[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become ...
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Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rube Goldberg
machine?
A programming language has a "core language" plus a package/module
system. In each successful language, the core language is neat-and-
tidy, but the package/module system is a Rube Goldberg machine. See
JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or C/C++. Lots of brain cycles are
spent on "programming language theory". We've roughly figured out
the primitives required to express real-world computation. In
contrast, we apparently have no "package management theory". We
have not figured out the primitives required to express
dependencies. As a result, we keep building new variants and
features, until we end up with <script>, require(), import, npm,
yarn, pnpm, (py)?(v|virtual|pip)?env, (ana)?conda, easy_install,
eggs and wheels ... Is it just a "law of software" that this must
happen to any successful language? Or are there examples of where
this it has not happened, and what can we learn from them? Is there
a "theory of package management", or a "lambda calculus of package
management" out there?
Author : jamesfisher
Score : 128 points
Date : 2023-01-30 10:04 UTC (12 hours ago)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It annoys me that every gee-whizz new language needs to have it's
| own package-management system.
|
| There's no reason why a package-management system needs to be
| language-specific; dependencies are often cross-language. Hell,
| even some blocks of code contain more than one language.
|
| The package-management system is responsible for deploying
| packages. The way a package is deployed should depend on the
| operating environment, not on the language. These language-
| specific packaging arrangements typically deploy into some
| private part of the file-system, organized in its own
| idiosyncratic way.
|
| Using git as a repository is just nuts. Git is privately-owned,
| and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk. You can't audit
| everything you install by hand; so these systems force you to
| install unaudited code, or simply not install.
|
| I've been using Debian derivatives for years. I appreciate having
| an audited repository, and an installation system that deploys
| code to more-or-less predictable filesystem locations.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because cross platform packages isn't a thing, and not everyone
| wants to create a package for every platform out there.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > There's no reason why a package-management system needs to be
| language-specific; dependencies are often cross-language. Hell,
| even some blocks of code contain more than one language.
|
| This sounds a lot like a case of https://xkcd.com/927/ .
| Languages have different ways of importing and installing
| dependencies, trying to create a package manager over all of
| those is just going to end up making things even more complex,
| especially if you target all platforms at once.
|
| > Using git as a repository is just nuts. Git is privately-
| owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk.
|
| Git is fully open source. Are you confusing Git and GitHub?
| tazjin wrote:
| > Languages have different ways of importing and installing
| dependencies
|
| They're not actually different. They call things differently,
| and they have different methods of passing the required
| lookup paths/artifacts/sources to their
| compilers/interpreters/linkers, but in the end _all_ of them
| are conceptually the same thing.
| krapp wrote:
| >but in the end all of them are conceptually the same thing
|
| The _concept_ of a programming language isn 't what people
| use, but the _concrete reality_ of specific implementations
| on specific hardware.
|
| You could also say that a coffee cup and a donut aren't
| actually different because they're topologically the
| same... but the facts on the ground do actually matter.
| tazjin wrote:
| It absolutely does matter in this case. We have written
| implementations of this concept for very different
| languages (Go, Common Lisp, Erlang, C) and the conceptual
| equality means that nothing is different at the core,
| only at the edges (where you integrate with each
| snowflake's particular flavour of "what are the names of
| the command-line arguments to the compiler" and so on).
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Using git as a repository is just nuts. Git is privately-
| owned, and stuffed with all kinds of unaudited junk.
|
| Do you mean github? Git is open source and one of the few
| pieces of software that works in a truly distributed fashion.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| You're right; I meant github. Sorry.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of
| unaudited junk.
|
| Also: what do I care that people store unaudited and insecure
| stuff in there?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The reasons language-specific package managers are popular:
|
| 1) "npm install" or "go get" or what have you, works on every
| platform (barring bugs), while "apt install" only works on
| some.
|
| 2) Most platform package managers aren't good at handling
| multiple versions of dependencies (which, neither are many
| language package managers, but they're easier to sandbox away
| with supplemental tools than system package managers are)
|
| 3) Most platform package managers lag way behind language-
| specific package managers, and may also lack tons and tons of
| packages that are available on those.
|
| > Git is privately-owned
|
| Git... hub, you mean?
| maple3142 wrote:
| Probably because your Debian doesn't work on other Linux
| distros like CentOS, Arch Linux ..., let alone MacOS and
| Windows. The holy grail would be a package manager that is both
| cross language and cross platform at the same time, but it
| seems too hard to be implemented in general.
|
| Anaconda is probably the closest as it also package many non
| python packages. Nix is also similar but it doesn't support
| Windows at all (without WSL)
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Git is privately-owned, and stuffed with all kinds of
| unaudited junk. [...] I 've been using Debian derivatives for
| years_
|
| Git is owned by the same owner as Linux. If you've been using
| Debian derivatives for years it seems you must have some trust
| to give that private entity? Unless the derivative you speak of
| is Debian GNU/k*BSD?
|
| Furthermore, if you give trust to Debian derivative projects,
| why not trust their Git builds? If you trust everything else in
| their distribution Git is a curious omission. Do you have a
| personal beef with Torvalds or something?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Have you used nuget for .NET? I have to say I've never once run
| into any of the problems I encounter sometimes weekly with NPM
| for Node.
| jrockway wrote:
| You mention Python and Node, which are programming language that
| unusually require end users to have the text of your program and
| all its dependencies on their own machine, and the languages
| store some parts of your program in /usr/lib and other parts of
| your program in your source directory. (npm does a little better
| here and at least puts the dependencies in your project
| directory.) Those constraints make development and packaging hard
| no matter what.
|
| Python and Node both need a way to compile the code down to a
| single statically-linked binary like more modern languages (Go,
| Rust), solving the distribution problem once and for all.
|
| There are module systems that aren't insane, like Go's module
| system. It uses semantic versioning to mediate version conflicts.
| Programs can import multiple major versions of the same module.
| The module requirements files ensure that every checkout of the
| code gets the exact same bytes of the code's dependencies. The
| compiler is aware of modules and can fetch them, so on a fresh
| workstation, "go test ./..." or "go install ./cmd/cool-thing" in
| a module-aware project works without running any other command
| first. It is actually so pleasant to use that I always think
| twice "do I want to deal with modules" before using a language
| like Javascript or Python, and usually decide "no".
|
| npm and pip are the DARK AGES. That's why you're struggling. The
| community has been unable to fix these fundamental flaws for
| decades, despite trying in 100 incompatible ways. I personally
| have given up on the languages as a result. The standard library
| is never enough. You HAVE to solve the module problem on day 1.
| briffle wrote:
| if npm and pip are DARK AGES what does that mean perl's CPAN
| is?
| jrockway wrote:
| I haven't used Perl for 15 years, but it was pretty miserable
| back then. Obviously I had my workflow and didn't run into
| too many problems, but I was certainly nervous about how I
| could share my work with other people. (Putting it into prod
| wasn't that bad. I don't know why, but it always went OK.
| CPANPLUS helped at the time.) I used to teach Perl trainings
| as a side job, and people would literally be in tears over
| @INC. It was bad.
|
| I don't use Python much these days, but it's not as bad as
| Perl 15 years ago. I see blog posts like "how to set up the
| perfect Python dev environment with Docker" and it makes me
| very sad, but at least teams are getting their work done. The
| edge cases of Python packaging, though, are really really
| bad. For example, the C compiler that Python was compiled
| with (and C library; musl vs. glibc) affects installability
| of modules through pip. This really forces your Linux
| distribution to be the arbiter of what modules you can use,
| which is always too out of date for development. Also, the
| exact requirements (what are the sha256s and URLs of the code
| files that this code depends on) depends on architecture,
| compiler, etc. As far as I can tell, you have to run code to
| find the whole dependency tree. That is the fatal flaw I see
| with Python's packaging system.
|
| I spent a lot of time trying to use Bazel to unify all the
| work my company does across languages. Python was the killer
| here. We do depend on a lot of C extensions, and I have a C
| toolchain built with Bazel (so that arm64 mac users can
| cross-compile to produce Linux releases; maybe a dumb
| requirement, but it would be too unpopular to discriminate
| against certain developer devices), but getting Python built
| with that toolchain, and using that Python to evaluate
| requirements.txt didn't work. (There are bugs open; they all
| end with "Python has to fix this".) As a result, you don't
| get compatible versions of, say, numpy with this setup.
| Dealbreaker. Partially Bazel's fault, partially Pyton's
| fault.
|
| (It pained me to use Bazel for Go, but it did all work. While
| the workflow wasn't as nice as what Go has built in, easy
| things were hard and hard things were possible. I had working
| binaries within a few hours, buildable on any supported
| workstation type, with object and test caching in the cloud.)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| There is no real theory because it's a solved problem--packages
| and dependencies form a DAG or graph and it's just an ordering
| and traversal problem that's easily solved.
|
| The pain and fragmentation you're mentioning is that everyone has
| different opinions about how they want to
| configure/bundle/organize code and package metadata. That's
| really the only core difference between deb/rpm, npm/yarn,
| pip/poetry/conda/<a million other python tools>, handmade
| makefile/cmake/autotools/etc. People just had different ideas
| about how they wanted to do things at the periphery. At their
| core all of those tools are just simple DAG walkers.
|
| Basically, you're thinking it's a technical problem when in
| reality it's just a social issue. Some people prefer something
| one way, others prefer it the other way--there is no consensus
| (and likely never will be, people will always be building tools
| to do things their way).
| jmull wrote:
| Well, not DAG, because the A is for acyclic, and dependency
| graphs can definitely contain cycles.
| lamontcg wrote:
| They really shouldn't, and some dependency systems like
| rubygems/bundler after the molinillo switch ban them
| entirely.
| pxc wrote:
| Yeah, that's a misfeature. It should definitely be a DAG.
| Which ecosystems 'support' that besides Node?
| jcarrano wrote:
| Because anyone can write a mediocre "gets the immediate problem
| solved" type of package manager, while designing and implementing
| a programming language that someone else would want to use
| requires way more knowledge and skill.
|
| Eventually the shortcomings of the package manager will become
| more evident, but at first it will seem to work and solve some
| pain points programmer have.
|
| Something similar goes for build systems.
| emmelaich wrote:
| > _we apparently have no "package management theory"_
|
| Honestly, I'd like to have a lowest common denominator of "just
| dump the contents of the tar/zip archive" _here_.
|
| Only check required would be to ensure you're not overwriting
| anything.
|
| Dependencies and PATH management etc could be done out-of-band.
| That way you would not have to re-download stuff at least.
| Linux-Fan wrote:
| I actually wrote something of that sorts for my personal
| projects:
|
| https://masysma.net/11/maartifact.xhtml
|
| Downloads tgz if not already downloaded, saves it to directory
| `../x-artifacts` and optionally extracts it.
| namelosw wrote:
| Modern languages like Rust and Elixir are fine.
|
| JavaScript, C/C++, Python are very old and the package systems
| were pretty much bolt-on. And of course a lot of historical
| factors were playing a bit role.
|
| In the old days, people usually start minimal. When they get
| burned they also find they were locked-in - thus the bolt-ons.
|
| > we apparently have no "package management theory"
|
| People are definitely standing on top of each others' shoulders.
| Node.js npm actually felt like Ruby package tools but also being
| first-party (they also cut some corners, and made some design
| choices - some worked well and some didn't).
|
| i.e. Hex for Elixir feels like nothing new, but avoided most
| common pitfalls others have experienced. I believe most language
| designers nowadays can do the same, given they want to play it
| safe and want nothing too novel.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Avoiding past pitfalls is the best part of a new language
| ecosystem. I remember when Python was the new kid on the block
| and how joyous it was to work with in comparison to Perl. By
| the time Ruby came around, the same thing was being said about
| it, sometimes with aspersions cast at Python and how wonky it
| was.
|
| Maybe after a few more generational cycles we'll develop the
| One True Language, bug-free, intuitive tooling, and sane to
| use.
| noloblo wrote:
| What about haskell cabal and stack
| hiljusti wrote:
| I appreciate Hackage and its lack of garbage, although I think
| the exclusivity can't scale. I also like Haskell's module
| system
|
| All other aspects of Haskell package management feel
| unfinished, like "an exercise left to the reader." The lack of
| polish is astounding.
|
| See also: "Why I Don't Code in Haskell Anymore"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPwnfSmyAGI) from TsodingDaily
| whateveracct wrote:
| You don't have to use Hackage.
|
| What part is unfinished? Just docs and the verbose CLI? It
| solves for versions, you can declare native dependencies in
| various ways, it has multiple solid integrations with Nix
| (which in turn automatically resolves both Haskell and native
| deps for you).
|
| Also that video is not a compelling source. That guy is just
| wrong lol. Or, rather, it's just his opinion that seems to be
| based on the 5-10 years ago state of Haskell.
|
| I'm an engineer (professionally - in Haskell - for years),
| and I don't find anything about the packaging or
| "engineering" painful.
|
| If we're talking engineering, the optimizing compiler + RTS
| are extremely impressive.
| tsukikage wrote:
| They all followed the same process:
|
| Step 1: look at all the existing package+module systems, and
| realise they are all horrible Rube Goldberg machines, way too
| bloated for the simple thing you want to do
|
| Step 2: write your own package+module system! It's lean, mean and
| just does the simple obvious thing your simple one-man project
| needs.
|
| Step 3: your system hits the real world! Your system is used with
| projects that involve more than one person and grow organically,
| and that spread to more and more esoteric environments. The Rube
| Goldberg projects have Rube Goldberg aims and their target
| ecosystems have Rube Goldberg requirements while goalposts shift
| continuously with tight deadlines. You add features and toggles
| to your system to support these things.
|
| Step 4: congratulations! You are the proud inventor and owner of
| yet another Rube Goldberg machine. It is now time to move on to
| better things; the system, meanwhile, is handed over to some
| committee and will only grow in complexity from here.
|
| https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_palace.htm
| rpigab wrote:
| I think package management is something so important you either
| have to get it right on the first released version of the
| language, or never release an official one at all. So if you look
| at C, there was basically no internet or even HTTP, so if they
| wanted to fetch + store dependencies from centralized
| repositories, it would have been difficult and then need to
| change a lot over the years. Python is the worst to me, I love
| the language, but I hate the tooling, managing installations,
| packages, modules, etc.
|
| Sometimes languages are relased with just a spec and don't want
| to force any choice of tool or way of doing things on you, so you
| just manage that yourself or create third party tools, and that's
| where it gets wild in every direction, but it also creates room
| for new ideas, innovation, which later are used in "official"
| modern package managers built in the language tools.
|
| And yeah, nowadays I use Rust even for scripting stuff that would
| be easier to do in Python, just because I don't want to create a
| thousandth virtualenv, find a lib that does what I want but it's
| for Python<3.6 ou Python2 etc., so in the end it's easier in Rust
| even though some new libs require nightly builds of the
| toolchain.
| cageface wrote:
| I've also found it not that much harder to do scripting kinds
| of things in Rust vs Ruby or Python. It's a bit of extra effort
| of course but having a nice self contained binary at the end is
| pretty handy.
| jonfw wrote:
| We've been using Go to build CLI tools rather than writing
| scripts for certain tasks recently, and I've found that
| Golang is very well suited for that.
|
| we use the urfave/cli library, which works great, and gets
| you a ton of things for almost free (passing and documenting
| flags and arguments) that you just don't get easily in bash
| junon wrote:
| I was going to disagree that Python's is the worst, but then I
| thought about it and.. yeah, it's up there. I think there are
| definitely some other ecosystems with worse package management
| systems but they're certainly not as mainstream as Python.
| rpigab wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/
|
| As I've said, I still love it and use it a lot, easy to
| write, easy to explain and share, easy to run without
| dependencies and if your code runs the same on different
| versions of Python, but hard to choose which type of
| virtualenv you want to use, then pick the right versions of
| dependencies that work together (if you have big dependencies
| like in data science for example, and some of them are less
| maintained than others, which happens because the Python
| ecosystem is rich but people start projects and move on,
| happens everywhere but because it's easy to start a project
| in Python, it's also easy to leave it unmaintained).
|
| I love explaining Python code to non coders!
| [deleted]
| michael1999 wrote:
| Part of it is deliberately ignoring the lessons of the past
| because they seem like overkill. Python has the excuse that it is
| old enough to predate the lessons of Java and Maven. But the node
| and js worlds deliberately ignored things like namespaces and
| mandatory version specification because they were uncool. And
| then they had to introduce package-lock and typo-squatting
| defences because the complexity of the world isn't always
| negotiable.
| [deleted]
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| If I wanted to point out what the greatest mistake in the
| conception of the NodeJS package manager--npm--is, its 'original
| sin', if you will, is the conceit that SemVer ('semantic
| versioning', a great idea in itself) is 100% reliable and that,
| therefore, it would be heretic or contradictory for a single
| module or sub-package in a project to ever want to `require()`
| two distinct versions of a module, say, xyz@1.0.1 and xyz@1.2.0.
| This is now fixed[1] but the developers stubbornly refused to see
| the occasional necessity of doing just this for many years.
|
| [1](https://medium.com/weekly-webtips/how-to-install-multiple-
| ve...)
| tazjin wrote:
| > In contrast, we apparently have no "package management theory".
| We have not figured out the primitives required to express
| dependencies
|
| We have a good hunch. The basic theory behind Nix definitely goes
| in the right direction, and if we look away from all the surface-
| level nonsense going on in Nix, it's conceptually capable (e.g.
| [0]) of being a first-class language dependency manager.
|
| For this to work at scale we'd need to overcome a couple of large
| problems though (in ascending order of complexity):
|
| 1. A better technical implementation of the model (working on it
| [1]).
|
| 2. A mindset shift to make people understand that "binary
| distribution" is not a goal, but a side-effect of a reasonable
| software addressing and caching model. Without this conceptual
| connection, everything is 10x harder (which is why e.g. Debian
| packaging is completely incomprehensible - their fundamental
| model is wrong).
|
| 3. A mindset shift to make people understand that their pet
| programming language is not actually a special snowflake. No
| matter what the size of your compilation units is, whether you
| call modules "modules", "classes" or "gorboodles", whether you
| allow odd features like mutually-recursive dependencies and
| build-time arbitrary code execution etc.: Your language fits into
| the same model as every other language. You don't have to NIH a
| package manager.
|
| This last one is basically impossible at the current stage. Maybe
| somewhere down the line, if we manage to establish such a model
| successfully in a handful of languages and people see for
| themselves, but for now we have to just hold out.
|
| [0]: https://code.tvl.fyi/about/nix/buildGo
|
| [1]: https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot/-/tree/tvix/
| unicornmama wrote:
| If the community just focused on creating a great package
| manager instead of an Everything Monster, and "meeting
| developers where they are", then Nix might do something great.
| potamic wrote:
| What's a good source, for someone who has never used nix, to
| read about its conceptual model and how it is different from
| contemporary dependency managers?
| rkrzr wrote:
| We wrote a blog post on how Nix helps us solve some of the
| problems that we encountered with other package managers like
| e.g. apt and pip.
|
| https://www.channable.com/tech/nix-is-the-ultimate-devops-
| to...
|
| (It doesn't go very much in depth on the conceptual model,
| but touches on the the main ideas)
| tazjin wrote:
| There really isn't one that I know of. There's the original
| thesis[0], but it's from a different time and it focuses only
| on the package management (~ for a distribution) aspect.
|
| Everything else is mostly written to teach people how to use
| Nix, and the more recent the thing is the more it will focus
| on surface-level features of the C++ implementation of Nix.
|
| [0]: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
| [deleted]
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Nix is not capable of becoming a first class dependency manager
| because it does not manage dependencies. It does not attempt
| any version or feature resolution. Besides, saying Nix could
| become a package manager is like saying that C could become a
| package manager.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Nix is an umbrella for a stack of various solutions.
|
| Nixpkgs doesn't do version or feature resolution, but other
| tools (that are not nixpkgs) can and do.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Under this abuse of terminology, a pocket calculator is
| capable of becoming a package/dependency manager. Or any
| other technology which conceivably could be put to work
| toward the package management problem, _but has not yet_
| been adapted to that need. I concede that these statements
| are "true", but they fail the relevancy test of
| communication.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Like I said in another comment, the problem is curating
| the giant database that maps version numbers to commit
| refs. Once you pass this roadblock, the tools Nix gives
| you make dependency resolution a quite a bit simpler
| problem to solve.
|
| The next step is then realizing you actually don't need
| the useless legacy version numbering scheme at all, and
| that you wasted that effort for nothing.
| tazjin wrote:
| If you had written this as a question rather than a definite
| (and somewhat aggressive) statement I might've explained it
| to you.
| pxc wrote:
| Pretend _I_ asked the nice version of this, for the benefit
| of other readers?
|
| I do think a Nix-like tool to be used for writing/replacing
| package managers for new programming languages would
| benefit from some dependency resolving functionality,
| instead of just saying 'shove it in a monorepo or pin via
| VCS refs instead of semver'. Is that not necessary?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Nix is capable of that, but you need a database mapping
| versions to VCS refs.
|
| Nixpkgs doesn't go down that road because it would be
| unwieldy at their scale, but more specialized nix-based
| tools do.
| pxc wrote:
| (I actually think Nixpkgs _could_ and _should_ go down
| this road, with a couple of caveats, for immense benefit.
| But I 'm curious about what tazjin thinks here.)
| noobermin wrote:
| I think 3 is probably true for language developers, but for
| users, language repos feel like they are needed because like
| none of the linux distros really ship everything you need, or
| even a reliable fraction without installing a bunch of dumb
| hacks to get it to work. It's much easier just to do "pip
| install" so that's where the demand is.
|
| And sure, may be you're right that distro packaging is the
| "wrong model," again, that is the problem then for distros,
| users are stuck using ubuntu or whatever so they don't have the
| option to do the "right" thing, so they do use the mishmash of
| packaging/repo systems as just the cost of doing business.
| carlmr wrote:
| Apart from not shipping what you need, you often only get a
| fraction of the versions you need.
|
| For development you may want to test your code against
| multiple versions of the system libraries. This is not easy
| using a distro package manager.
| fragmede wrote:
| Maybe our definition of "easy" doesn't agree, but for
| Ksplice, we had to build kernels using the exact same,
| often old versions of GCC and everything else (binutils,
| etc). We made schroots (this predated docker) and then we
| used the system package manager to install the requisite
| old version of packages. Wasn't trivial to get the whole
| system setup, but getting old versions of packages
| installed wasn't impossibly hard either.
| folex wrote:
| Yes!
|
| I'm in a team that works on a pet prog lang for distributed
| systems, and we did some research of using an existing package
| managing systems. We've settled on NPM for now, but god I wish
| there would be a better generic package manager out there.
| pxc wrote:
| Check out Denxi. Might be the closest thing to what you're
| looking for today, and is informed by the state of the art in
| package management without totally imposing strict discipline
| on all packages.
|
| https://docs.racket-lang.org/denxi-guide/index.html
| drpyser22 wrote:
| Did you compare nix to npm? Is there a good comparison out
| there?
| mijoharas wrote:
| Not a generic package manager, but it's probably worth
| calling out asdf as the generic version manager[0] (maybe
| you're already aware of it, but it's a generic replacement
| for nvm, rvm, virtualenv, *vm, which supports any language
| based on plugins.)
|
| Again, maybe you're already aware of it, but I think it's a
| nice example of genericising a concern common to many
| languages which sounds similar to what you're asking for
| (albeit unfortunately in a slightly different space).
|
| [0] https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
| dmix wrote:
| At a minimum it's useful having the `.tool-versions`
| dotfile in a project directory which lists the versions of
| each language, db, and package manager version (our Rails
| project lists versions for ruby, bundler, postgres, node,
| yarn, redis). Even if all devs don't use asdf, it's a
| useful reference point.
|
| https://asdf-vm.com/manage/configuration.html#tool-versions
|
| Similar to an `.editorconfig` to globally define stuff like
| tab widths for IDEs.
| pastage wrote:
| 2) In Debian a binary package has almost always just been a
| cache, are we thinking about Debian packaging in completely
| different ways? Are you perhaps talking about the aspect of
| doing an "build world"[0] that bsd, Gentoo and now Nix are
| better at?
|
| [0] Edit: rebuilding your dependencies if you need it and
| handling that seemlesly CAN be hard on Debian. Something that
| even Nix struggles with even if they are best in class by far.
| It is also completely different from the notion of compiling a
| program. I wonder what you consider the goal of a package
| system.
| tazjin wrote:
| > are we thinking about Debian packaging in completely
| different ways?
|
| Quite likely! The whole concept of separately building a
| source/binary package, and then uploading/"deploying" that
| binary package, already violates the notion of being "just a
| cache" for me. There might be a tool in Debian where I can
| seamlessly say "do not download this package from the
| repository, but build it locally" - but even if so, it would
| surprise me if it can give me the same guarantees as Nix
| (i.e. guarantees about the artifact being repeatable, and
| being addressable by its inputs rather than a human-curated
| tag or version number).
|
| > Something that even Nix struggles with
|
| Nix only struggles with it to the degree that some of the
| higher-level abstractions in the existing package set (which
| are built _on top of_ the fundamental model, not _part of_
| it) can be confusing /underdocumented, but conceptually this
| is a simple thing to do in Nix. Even practically at this
| point it is _usually_ simple - unless you 're dealing with
| Haskell or Javascript, of course.
|
| > I wonder what you consider the goal of a package system
|
| I want it to let me describe a desired state, and then make
| it so. That state is best represented as a graph, like a
| Merkle tree, of the instructions for the individual steps and
| a way to address them. An individual step is a transformation
| (i.e. some program) executed over some sources, yielding some
| result (likely in the filesystem). I want any distribution of
| binaries to be a result of using this addressing scheme, and
| looking up/copying an already built equivalent artifact for
| that thing. I want a text file containing the string "Hello
| HN" to be represented by the same abstraction that represents
| a specific .so file, the `emacs` package, the configuration
| of my entire system, the configuration of a cluster of
| systems and so on. I want this system to be programmable so I
| can work around the shortcomings that its original designers
| missed.
|
| Nix (and Guix) do large parts of this already, and are
| conceptually (though not yet technically) capable of doing
| all of it. Technically, so is something like Bazel - but its
| complexity and maintenance requirements make that
| prohibitively expensive (basically only Google can use Bazel
| like that, and even they have delineated areas where they
| "give up" on wrapping things in Bazel).
| goodpoint wrote:
| > There might be a tool in Debian where I can seamlessly
| say "do not download this package from the repository, but
| build it locally" - but even if so, it would surprise me if
| it can give me the same guarantees as Nix
|
| It's been there for 15 or 20 years. Also Debian has been
| doing reproducible builds before Nix.
| pxc wrote:
| > It's been there for 15 or 20 years.
|
| Has it? What I remember being the standard practice for
| customizing packages was apt-get source
| && sudo apt-get build-dep && vim <something> && debuild
| -b
|
| fewer than 15 years ago. And it's not much like what the
| parent poster has in mind. It modifies the global state
| of your system, it requires multiple steps, it produces a
| different artifact than you might get in the repos at any
| given time, it leaves things in your CWD on your
| filesystem owned by your current user, whatever.
|
| (Some of that may also apply to `apt-get source --build`,
| idk.)
|
| With Nix or Guix, when a cached binary artifact for a
| given package is missing, _you may not even notice_ , the
| fallback to building from source is so transparent.
|
| I encourage you to actually try Nix or Guix, including
| writing packages for them, and including adding a patch
| or overriding a build flags in an existing package, to
| see how the model is really different.
|
| > Also Debian has been doing reproducible builds before
| Nix.
|
| What Debian does for reproducible builds and how Nix
| embodies reproducibility are qualitatively different. If
| you understood both, you'd understand why this is a silly
| point to raise.
|
| (Debian's work on reproducible builds is great. Every
| distro benefits from most of it, and everyone in the Nix
| community is grateful for it.)
| tremon wrote:
| _With Nix or Guix, when a cached binary artifact for a
| given package is missing, you may not even notice, the
| fallback to building from source is so transparent._
|
| I consider this to be one of the main drawbacks of these
| systems -- it assumes that every machine is build-
| capable. I do not want compilers installed on my
| production servers (nor would I want my RPi to attempt to
| rebuild half the world because the package server was
| down). I'm not sure how Nix handles this, but I'm pretty
| sure that's not possible with Guix.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| Even in the best case where Debian satisfies all the
| reproducibility goals it sets for itself (i.e. the ~96%
| at https://tests.reproducible-
| builds.org/debian/reproducible.ht... becomes 100%), each
| Debian package is still only a reproducible function _of
| the current versions of its build dependencies_ at the
| time it was built. Upgrading those dependencies can
| change the build output, and this is still normal and
| expected in Debian; it's the entire point of a binNMU.
|
| In order to reproduce a given Debian package from
| scratch, one would need to track down long chains of
| historical versions of packages from sid. Due to circular
| dependencies, these chains probably snake back to the
| very first versions of Debian before the availability of
| snapshot.debian.org. It's possible that human judgment
| could be used to break some chains at an earlier point by
| substituting different versions, but this goes outside
| the guarantees provided by Debian's reproducibility.
|
| Nix guarantees that every package is built with the
| specified versions of its dependencies, and so on
| recursively. Some more rebuilding is necessary to
| maintain this guarantee, but in exchange, it enables
| stronger notions of reproducibility that Debian can't.
| 0x0 wrote:
| Well of course it snakes back, and likely beyond debian's
| inception, your initial c compiler has to come from
| somewhere.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| Right. Nix bootstraps from a fixed collection of seed
| binaries, and everything in any given commit of nixpkgs
| is derived from the seed binaries and versions of
| software that exist in that commit of nixpkgs. It doesn't
| solve the "trusting trust" problem with those seed
| binaries, but it does solve the "arbitrarily long chains"
| problem.
|
| (The work at https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/ aims to
| minimize the needed binary seed to a human-auditable
| size, and should be applicable to Nix and Guix.)
| Nursie wrote:
| > There might be a tool in Debian where I can seamlessly
| say "do not download this package from the repository, but
| build it locally"
|
| apt-get --build source package_name
|
| It's unlikely to be fully repeatable to the point of
| producing an identical binary, but it's also not some
| esoteric set of procedures.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Debian packages can have pre/postinstall scripts that mutate
| the overall state of the system in arbitrary ways. This is
| both (a) necessary to make some thing work and (b) ruins the
| theoretical model.
| Nursie wrote:
| Those dirty practicalities breaking my perfect mental model
| again!
|
| (This is a huge issue in our field in all sorts of ways,
| and a constant source of both pain and compromise)
| pxc wrote:
| Alternatively: that pesky _lack of discipline_
| obstructing my optimizations and features again.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > This is ... necessary to make some thing work
|
| Things work in NixOS without the need of any of that. So,
| no it is not necessary.
|
| It's a need created purely from the other directives of the
| Debian organization.
| hiljusti wrote:
| Not necessary, but certainly it's easier to implement and
| get stuff done. It starts to break down and show its
| cracks the larger and larger it gets, though.
|
| The difference between almost all Linux or BSD packaging
| systems and nixpkgs is like the difference between
| dynamic and compile-time-type-checked programming
| languages.
| pxc wrote:
| You can have a much more conventional package manager
| without pre- or post-install hooks. One ex-Debian
| developer created such a package manager as a research
| project, presumably to prove a point to other Debian
| people with the same head-in-the-sand attitude about the
| state of Debian's package tooling.
|
| It doesn't require the same kind of patching as Nix does
| (although sometimes patching does help avoid requiring
| those scripts).
|
| Check it out: https://distr1.org/
| jnxx wrote:
| And Guix has put that in an beautiful form. There are two
| things which make Guix special:
|
| 1. The package definitions are just a normal, battle-proven,
| very well defined general-purpose, functional-style supporting
| programming language (Scheme).
|
| 2. There is no conceptual difference between a package
| definition in the public Guix system, and a self-written
| package definition which a developers makes to build and test
| his own package, or to build and run a specific piece of
| software. The difference is equally small as between using an
| Emacs package, and configuring that package in ones .emacs
| configuration file.
| pastage wrote:
| Why do we need different systems for all languages, all
| Linux/Windows/Mac/Android distributions. Why are no one reusing
| what is already there. It might seem like an easy problem to fix.
| Rust, Java and Go certainly has their problems too, not quite
| sure why people feel they are good examples.
|
| I think the world is complicated and you will in the end need to
| support compilations/installations on AmigaOS 2.05 on m68k
| running in kubernetes native.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Because I don't want my side project to share dependencies with
| system-wide python.
| perrygeo wrote:
| I'd say we have a fairly good existing theory that explains
| modern package management: Conway's Law.
|
| We self-organize into communities of practice and select the
| package management strategy that works best. Reaching across
| communities to develop a grand centralized strategy that fits
| everyone's needs would be __possible__, but involves significant
| communication and coordination overhead. So instead we fracture,
| and the tooling ecosystem reflects ad-hoc organizational units
| within the community.
|
| Ecosystems like Rust cargo that have batteries included from the
| start have an advantage, virtually all Rust developers have a
| single obvious path to package management because of this
| emergent social organization.
|
| Ecosystems like Python's seem like the wild west, there is deep
| fracturing (particularly between data science and software
| engineering) and no consensus on the requirements or even the
| problems. So Python fractures further, ironically in a search for
| something that can eventually unify the community. And python
| users feel the strain of this additional overhead every day,
| needing to side with a team just to get work done.
|
| I'd argue both of these cases are driven by consequences easily
| predictable from Conway's Law.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Is there a name for a phenomena/theory that states "the more
| people you add to a problem while asking them to solve it in an
| opinionated way, the more likely you are to get
| conflict/fragmentation/less people agreeing overall as
| consensus gets diluted and number of possibilities/opinions
| increases?"
| neilv wrote:
| The Racket module system, designed by Matthew Flatt, is great.
|
| But to fully appreciate it, it helps to understand syntax
| transformation in Racket. Once the rigorous phase system forces
| non-kludgy static rules about when things are evaluated, your
| syntax transformers and the code on which they depend could cause
| a mess of shuffling code among multiple files to solve dependency
| problems... until you use submodules with the small set of
| visibility rules, and then suddenly your whole tricky package
| once again fits in a single file cleanly.
|
| I leveraged this for some of my embedded doc and test
| experiments, without modifying the Racket core. (I really, really
| like single-source-file modules that embed doc, test, and package
| metadata all in the same file, in logical places.)
| karel_3d wrote:
| I like golang package management in practice - sure, you have the
| "v2" thing and "every package can bump any package if you're not
| careful", but it works in practice because people _are_ careful,
| and the minimal version selection is always deterministic.
|
| The proxy thing and the drama with sr.ht is annoying, but maybe
| it was solved while I didn't look.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| In C#, I liked the pre-Nuget approach where you just made sure
| 3rd party dlls were in a location relative to source code
| control, (or in source code control if they were small.)
|
| Not really "package management," but it was straightforward and
| worked very well... (Until you had to juggle 32/64 bit native
| dlls.)
| silon42 wrote:
| You can do that with nuget too.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Because of a surplus of worn out boots, candles, chickens,
| bowling balls (all bygone common, everyday, understandable
| items), and human invention (meaning "copying" badly, wheel
| reinvention - seldomly punctuated with novel synthesis).
|
| Or was that open source software? Or was that any private
| corporate software ecosystem? If I squint the problems all start
| to look the same. I must need glasses, considering my squint
| frequency.
| intrasight wrote:
| I'd think that with all the CS PhDs, there'd be some academic
| work in this area. I haven't gone looking.
|
| My experience as a .Net developer has not been that it's a Rube
| Goldberg machine. I isolate all my projects and minimize 3rd
| party dependencies.
| [deleted]
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Have you read https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-
| package-m... ?
|
| The author does a great job pointing out the problems, theory,
| and ecosystem change that makes it a Rube Goldberg machine.
|
| By definition, a package manager is always "incomplete" because
| it cannot catch all the security vulnerabilities, binary
| compatibility, or knowing the dependencies ahead of time nor
| their interactions together. Thus it can be unsuccessful at
| managing dependencies - its primary job.
|
| Source: Also work on a notable package manager.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| It sounds like you're familiar with the status quo, so let's look
| at this as a matter of requirements:
|
| - Cross-platform - Wraps another packaging format - Lowest disk
| space - Dependency version solving - An OS can run make changes
| to its own low-level state using its own tools - User can
| configure when and what are installed
|
| Even Nix, which has its own language and isolation model, can't
| meet all these.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Nix almost does meet those though.
|
| It's cross-platform to some degree. If Windows is a requirement
| for this, I see why it doesn't qualify.
|
| Nix wraps other packaging formats all the time. There's endless
| x2nix converters.
|
| In a way, Nix is "lowest disk space" - by nature of lazy
| evaluation, Nix closures are always exactly what they need.
| Now, they may "actually" need less and are holding onto more
| due to how packages are written by people. And you do need to
| GC.
|
| Dependency version solving can actually be punted to other
| tools. In Haskell, Nix uses a combination of cabal and pkg-
| config to handle Haskell + C deps.
|
| NixOS can swap out the kernel along with anything else with a
| line or two in your config.
| ChrisRackauckas wrote:
| Julia and Rust seem to have package systems that are fine and
| manageable. I think these are really just major problems in
| Javascript, Python, and C/C++ (exactly the languages you mention)
| because the kind of widespread OSS code sharing just didn't exist
| to the extent it does today back when those languages were
| designed. People shared code through email, but didn't expect one
| button to pull in 200 Github repositories, and thus weren't built
| with the expectations required to make that be stable.
|
| Back when those languages were designed, you'd manually download
| the few modules you need, if you downloaded any packages at all.
| In C you'd normally build your own world, since it came before
| the www times, and C++ kind of inherited that. But languages
| which came out later decided that we now live in a world where
| most of the code that is executed is packages, most likely
| packages which live on Github. So Julia and Rust build this into
| the language. Julia in particular with the Project.toml and
| Manifest.jl for fully reproducing environments, its package
| manager simply uses git and lets you grab the full repository
| with `]dev packagename`, its package registry system lets you
| extend with private package worlds.
|
| I think the issue is that dependencies are central, so you can
| never remove old package systems because if that's where the old
| (and rarely updated) dependencies live, then you need to keep it
| around. But for dependencies to work well, you need all
| dependencies to be resolved using the same package system. So
| package systems don't tend to move very fast in any language,
| whatever you had early has too much momentum.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Tying package management to GitHub seems convenient in the
| short term, but will be the baggage of the next generation.
|
| I cringe hard when I see projects depending on git repos,
| without pinning a version or commit.
| staunton wrote:
| It's not actually tied to GitHub. If GitHub died tomorrow,
| they would easily be able to move on and host the packages
| somewhere else. There's no way to do this without hosting.
| Also, there is a way to pin a version or commit. Julia for
| example always stores the exact commit information for all
| packages in the "Manifest" file. There are also
| straightforward ways to demand certain versions and package
| maintainers have the opportunity to specify compatibility and
| requirements precisely.
| simiones wrote:
| There will be a mess of dependencies of old projects that
| depend of projects that have since moved off GitHub, there
| will be name clashes between GitHub projects and BitBucket
| projects etc. These ecosystems are very much dependent on
| GitHub, and if/when anything permanent changes, it will be
| a mess to move off of it.
| ChrisRackauckas wrote:
| > there will be name clashes between GitHub projects and
| BitBucket projects etc.
|
| The package manager requires a canonical URL for the git
| repo. The location of dependencies doesn't matter, for
| example Github repos with Bitbucket dependencies work
| fine. The FastLapack packages lived on BitBucket at one
| point, and then migrated to Github, and that happened
| without a hitch to upstream packages like LinearSolve.jl
| or DifferentialEquations.jl.
|
| Also, it takes a one line change to General change a
| package's from Github to BitBucket. It didn't take me
| more than 2 minutes when I tried. Did you not have a
| similar experience? Can you show the PR where you gave it
| a try? Or is your response just speculation?
|
| The package server mirrors the repos, so even if these
| services went down it would not break the dependency
| chain (developers wouldn't be able to easily update the
| packages, but the installations and all would still
| work). So if tomorrow Github decided to make all of the
| code private for some odd reason, Julia's package server
| would continue to serve the current versions.
| simiones wrote:
| I was mostly speculating, and thinking more of how Go
| does Github dependencies. I am happy to hear that Cargo
| doesn't have the same sort of issues.
|
| I really should have looked into it more before
| commenting, especially since I knew Cargo is actually a
| well-designed and considered package system.
| staunton wrote:
| Just to make sure there are no misunderstandings.
| ChrisRackauckas was talking about Julia's package
| manager, (which is called Pkg, if you need to name it,
| although I would just call it "the package manager").
| Cargo is the Rust package manager.
| [deleted]
| henrydark wrote:
| Strictly speaking, hosting like github isn't the only way,
| an alternative being some peer to peer network like
| torrents
| ChrisRackauckas wrote:
| Julia and Rust all work with using versions tied to git tags.
| Package management isn't tied to Github but git: packages can
| live on Gitlab or BitBucket, though they generally don't and
| that's the choice of package developers. Because of that
| there are tie-ins to make Github really nice to use, but for
| example with Julia the only piece that is truly Github based
| is the fact that the General registry lives in a Github repo
| (https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General), but could
| easily migrate to another git platform if it needed to.
| gwd wrote:
| You haven't explicitly enumerated the things about those
| packaging systems which seem "Rube Goldberg" to you; nor have you
| mentioned either Golang or Rust's package management. I'm pretty
| happy overall with Golang's package management, and from my
| little exposure to Rust's package manager, it seems fairly decent
| as well. Do either of them strike you as "Rube Goldberg"? What
| aspects, and why?
| thiht wrote:
| Package management in Go is weird but it works well. You just
| run go mod tidy from time to time and you're good. Add a module
| proxy if you want to prevent issues with repositories
| disappearing and you're gooder.
| gwd wrote:
| There's already a module proxy (pkg.go.dev) by default in new
| versions of Go, for just that purpose. In fact, one could
| argue that the automatic proxy is "Rube-Goldberg"-like: It
| works great normally, but if you need, for instance, to pull
| from a repo you just pushed to, you have to track down the
| magic rune to type to get `go get -u` to pull directly from
| your repo, rather than using the cached copy at pkg.go.dev.
| thiht wrote:
| > There's already a module proxy (pkg.go.dev) by default in
| new versions of Go, for just that purpose
|
| Is it really a proxy in this sense? I was under the
| impression that it did not keep cached copies of the code,
| just some metadata, so that it didn't actually protect
| about someone removing their repo. Maybe I'm wrong about
| that though.
| kardianos wrote:
| In go, if you just pushed to a repo a tagged version, say
| "v1.4.2", then you just specify "go get -u
| "myrepo.com/foo@v1.4.2". Internally it will fail to fetch
| from the moduel proxy, but then (by default) it will then
| look directly for the git repo, and it will still work. But
| you can also use go workspaces if you are co-developing
| modules in different repositories.
| conor_f wrote:
| At least in Python's case, I think people are much too hard on
| the packaging system. I don't think anyone has significant issues
| with pip itself as opposed to the runtime it exists within.
|
| Following from this, I think that most back-end applications
| should try solve their messy runtime environment issues with some
| containerization. Java/C(++) however...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I find myself in nightmarish scenarios with Python dependencies
| more often than I'd like to. This dependency is missing this
| wheel which is missing this bit of C tooling which needs
| system-level permissions to be installed through XCode on Mac
| (what?). I've somehow corrupted the package lock, now I'm
| looking at diffs and checking dependencies of dependencies,
| inspecting the virtual environment folder and questioning my
| life choices. PyCharm has somehow lost the sense of where the
| virtual environment is located, I now have a squiggly line and
| warning explosion in my IDE.
|
| You could argue many of these are not Python's fault, some can
| probably be attributed to carelessness on third-party and
| tooling devs or on my part. But let's invent a metric here: "%
| of time spent dependency troubleshooting over total programming
| time". I've had better experiences with this in other
| languages, and intuition tells me that my carelessness or that
| of third-party devs being equal, there is something not quite
| right about the Python dependency management story. I put up
| with it because like many others I think that the language is
| otherwise dope.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I don't think anyone has significant issues with pip itself
| as opposed to the runtime it exists within.
|
| Pip has lots of issues (IMO it's one of the worst package
| managers):
|
| - It installs dependencies globally by default! This makes it a
| massive pain to work with unless you get virtualenvs setup
| correctly. Which you have to remember to do every time you
| interact with a project.
|
| - It doesn't use lock files by default. You have to remember to
| lock your dependencies.
|
| - Packages that depend on C libraries have a tendency to fail
| with cryptic error messages if you don't have the library
| installed (which can be contrasted with node.js packages which
| tend to bundle the library, and will even compile it from
| source for you if there isn't a binary version available for
| your platform).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Everybody uses PIP, but the Python devs (well single BDFL)
| refuse to accept this and standardize the package manager. As a
| result, if you want to make a package, you must support
| everything.
|
| Also, PIP can't evolve, because nobody will make their packages
| even more complex to support PIP only idiosyncrasies. It
| doesn't matter that everybody uses PIP, you have to spend 90%
| of your time dealing with other package managers, so they are
| the ones on your mind all the time.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| > I don't think anyone has significant issues with pip
|
| and boy would you be wrong. I just tried to install `datasette-
| scraper` on my system. This didn't work because it would
| consistently pick up outdated versions of Django and `more-
| itertools` from the system's Python site-packages directory.
|
| By the way I learned to (1) install an updated version of
| Python that has the advantage of not being the one that the
| system uses; (2) do not use `pip` the executable but `python3.9
| -m pip`; (3) use `pip` with argument `--target vendor` to
| install everything in a dedicated project-owned directory; (4)
| prefix my invocation of the software with `PYTHONPATH=./vendor`
| to add that to the import path; (5) add a
| `vendor/sitecustomize.py` file with the lines `import sys;
| sys.path.pop()` to remove the system's `site-packages` from the
| path.
|
| That's a local installation of a Python package in five easy
| steps, no 'virtual-env' or some such! Pip is great! /s
| Izkata wrote:
| > no 'virtual-env' or some such!
|
| I'm pretty sure you're manually doing the same thing
| virtualenv (venv in python3) does for you...
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| I'd guess that, yes, and going forward I _may_ take a 2nd
| look at virtualenv. That said, I am a little proud and glad
| I managed to take it this far in this particular instance
| because I feel it has improved my ability to deal with
| Pythonic installation gotchas. Pip is a great teaching
| tool! /s
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I don't think anyone has significant issues with pip itself
| as opposed to the runtime it exists within.
|
| I'm running macOS with Macports, and oh boy. For a long time,
| the aws and eb CLI tools had different package requirements or
| whatnot, and you couldn't install both of them simultaneously
| for whatever reason. Some stuff installs fine with the system
| Python, some stuff needs Macports for a specific Python
| version, some stuff needs root access to install itself...
| anything Python is a hot mess.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| While I'm trained to use venvs for everything, it would be
| nicer to have a flat global list of dependencies in every
| version required of every package, and specify allowed
| versions in each project, which will use what you have and/or
| download what's missing.
| nine_k wrote:
| System Python? Root access? Oh. That's a terrible, terrible
| practice.
|
| First, one never touches the system Python. It's there for
| OS-managed stuff and to run OS components.
|
| Then, every Python-based tool should be installed in a
| separate, unprivileged virtualenv, with executables symlinked
| where you find them appropriate (usually ~/bin or
| /usr/local/bin).
|
| If you find yourself _ever_ issuing a `sudo pip install`,
| chances are million to one that you are doing a disservice to
| to yourself.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > First, one never touches the system Python. It's there
| for OS-managed stuff and to run OS components.
|
| Why would one want to _not_ use what the system provides?
| Everything not provided by the OS is additional maintenance
| burden on myself. The 'nix world has managed just fine
| with OS-provided bash, perl and other runtime dependencies
| for decades.
|
| > Then, every Python-based tool should be installed in a
| separate, unprivileged virtualenv, with executables
| symlinked where you find them appropriate (usually ~/bin or
| /usr/local/bin).
|
| No one has time for all that. I'm not a Python developer -
| as a user I'm happy enough if it _barely works_.
|
| When an ecosystem requires messing around with completely
| separate instances of the runtime _for each program_ ,
| that's not a good sign for the quality of the ecosystem as
| a whole.
| anthk wrote:
| Then when your system installed Python begins to crap out
| your whole system down, don't ask for solutions.
| vt85 wrote:
| [dead]
| simiones wrote:
| Java's Maven has been the nicest package management tool I've
| ever worked with. Apart from the fact that definitions are a
| bit verbose, it supported everything I've ever wanted from such
| a tool:
|
| 1. Clear definitions of what is an artifact that it manages,
| easily described in a versioned file but still separate from
| your source code
|
| 2. Simple support to combine internal and external sources
|
| 3. Support for interacting with other package ecosystems (you
| can easily write a pom.xml for any other kind of package and
| reference it from your Java projects)
|
| 4. Not picky about version number formats
|
| 5. Not reliant on other tools to handle any step of package
| management (except for compilation, of course)
|
| 6. Works at the project level and has no problems about
| different versions being used in different projects on the same
| machine (with a shared cache for efficiency)
| EFreethought wrote:
| I would like to second that Maven works for me as well.
|
| A lot of posters have said that Rust and Go work well.
|
| Honestly, the OP sounds like the stereotype of a JS
| developer: "This is a problem for Javascript, therefore it
| must be a problem for everyone else, too."
|
| No, guys, it's just you. Every single time.
| groestl wrote:
| And because of that, maven infrastructure is and has been the
| target of multiple build frameworks and languages.
| warrenm wrote:
| It's far simpler than you think
|
| It all boils down to NIHS - "not invented here syndrome"
|
| Between developers being suspicious of anyone _else 's_ work, and
| their innate love to build things they'll use (your wheel is
| cool, I guess...but _MY_ wheel does THIS!) ...you get a gajillion
| libraries that overlaps 95% of the time (but _never_ on the 5%
| you "care" about)
|
| Eons ago David Pogue wrote in his review of Word (98, I think)
| for the Mac, "MacWrite fit on one floppy disk and had 95% of all
| the features I've ever needed in a word processor. Word take a
| CD, and has 96% of all the features I've ever needed in a word
| processor."
|
| Why is Word so big? Is it because a 'word processor' _needs_ to
| be that big?
|
| Why are there so many libraries with incredibly weird
| interdependencies (version 1.9.2a of this lib needs 2.1.x2 of
| that one, not 2.1.x3 or 2.1.g7; but if you have version 1.9.3 of
| this lib, you can use 2.1.x2 up through 2.1.x9 ot he other one)?
|
| Same thing - somebody somewhere sometime somewhy decided to use
| _that_ library in their own stuff, and is now forever and always
| bound to it (...until they refactor or rewrite a perfectly good
| tool that was in Scala into Haskell)
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I think the issue is how hard it is to test with a range of
| package versions. Maven initially supported package ranges, but
| that got dropped in favour of repeatable builds.
| badpun wrote:
| > neat-and-tidy (...) C++.
|
| This is a huge oxymoron. Additionally, C++ does not even have a
| package manager.
| jerf wrote:
| A solution can not be simpler than the problem.
|
| The problem is a classic "looks simple until you really examine
| it".
| TillE wrote:
| This is the answer. If you really want to learn about the
| issue, try designing a package manager in detail, and be sure
| to handle the thousands of edge cases which arise in real world
| usage.
| jakewins wrote:
| Have you used Go or Rust package ecosystems?
|
| My experience is that the older gen languages you mention had to
| invent package management, made lots of understandable mistakes
| and now are in a backwards compat hellscape.
|
| Rust and Go built their packaging story with the benefit of
| lessons learned from those other systems, and in my experience
| the difference is night and day.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doesn't look like it, see module drama in Go, while Rust is
| having an npm like ecosystem of tiny crates.
|
| Plus none of them handle binary library distribution as some of
| the packing models that came before them.
| tomcam wrote:
| Can you give me a one-liner about module drama in Go?
| pjmlp wrote:
| First they weren't supported, so the community created
| various ways of dealing it including a kind of Google's
| blessed implementation, then Google decided to create their
| own official way, then there was the transition time which
| I guess not everyone has done, having SCM urls as imports
| is just bad, and how GOPROXY DoS some SCM repos outside of
| Github.
| tomcam wrote:
| Thank you. I didn't quite see all that happening but
| heard echoes of it from time to time, then really jumped
| in after they adopted modules.
| Nzen wrote:
| [0] https://go.dev/blog/appengine-gopath gopath /
| workspaces original
|
| [1] https://go.dev/blog/migrating-to-go-modules current
| system
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310674 goproxy
| agressively polling sourcehut
|
| It's worth recognizing that go isn't alone in dns-based
| namespacing : java's maven/gradle use the same strategy:
| https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/gov/nih/imagej/imagej/1.47
| /
| tomcam wrote:
| Fantastic links, thanks! I like the DNS-based way so much
| I am still trying to tease apart its disadvantages.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Npm has lots of not understandable mistakes: it should already
| be as good with ES6+TS as other systems. Import should just
| work everywhere.
|
| We should have left Commonjs a long time ago, while keeping
| backwards compatibility.
|
| At the same time what I see with the node+npm system is that
| everything is just ,,it just doesn't work by default''.
|
| Having 10 other package managers doesn't work either, they are
| faster, but don't solve this problem.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Just use .mjs extension for your code, add extensions to your
| imports and everything does just work.
| dboreham wrote:
| Go and Rust don't have packages. They have tooling to pull
| library code from git and build it in-place to be linked into a
| local project. That's not (really) packaging.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Cargo does not "pull library code from git" unless you
| expressly ask for it to.
|
| And given that packages have to depend on other packages, and
| cannot depend on a git repository, that feature is mostly
| useful for testing bug fixes, private repos for leaf
| packages, stuff like that.
| tremon wrote:
| I thought Rust doesn't have binary libraries? If you
| declare a Rust dependency, cargo pulls its source and
| builds it together with your own code? I assume that's what
| the GP meant, anyway.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Go package management is a mess of hacks. It doesn't even have
| a repository, instead relying on source control systems to do
| the actual work, with special hacks for each source control
| system to define the artifacts that can be downloaded (e.g.
| using Git tags with some magic format, or Perforce commit
| Metadata). It requires you to physically move all code to a new
| folder in your version control if you want to increase the
| major version number. It requires users of your code to update
| all of their import statements throughout their code whenever
| you move your hosting. It relies on DNS for package identity.
| It takes arcane magic to support multiple Go modules in the
| same repo.
|
| I can go on, but it's a terrible hodge-podge of systems. It
| works nicely for simple cases (consuming libraries off Github),
| but it's awful when you go into details. And it's not even used
| by its creators - since Google has a monorepo and they actually
| use their internal universal build tool to just compile
| everything from source.
| mseepgood wrote:
| > It requires you to physically move all code to a new folder
| in your version control if you want to increase the major
| version number
|
| That's simply not true. That's only one way you can do it.
| Another way is to create a branch.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's the recommended way, but you're right it's not the
| only one. Still, updating your major version number is much
| harder than in any other version control system I've seen
| (since however you do it, it requires you to update every
| single file in your repo to point to the new module). It
| also complicates the relationship between git tags, go.mod
| file location, and location within the Git repo
| significantly.
| gwd wrote:
| > It relies on DNS for package identity.
|
| The flip side of this is that it never has to worry about
| naming collisions or namespacing: Your public package name
| must be a URL you control.
|
| Additionally, there is no requirement for a centralized
| package facility to be run. The Golang project is currently
| running pkg.go.dev, but that's only been in the last few
| years; and if they decided to get rid of it, it wouldn't
| significantly impact the development environment.
|
| Finally, the current system makes "typo-squatting attacks"
| harder to do. Consider the popular golang package
| github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3. The only way to "typosquat" the
| package is to typosquat somewhere up the dependency tree;
| e.g., by creating github.com/matn/go-sqlite3 or something.
| You can't typosquat github.com/mattn/sqlite3, or
| github.com/mattn/go-sqlite, because you don't own those
| namespaces; whereas with non-DNS-based package systems, the
| package would be called `go-sqlite3`, and `sqlite3` or `go-
| sqlite` would be much easier to typosquat.
|
| All those things I find really valuable; and honestly it's
| something I wish the Rust ecosystem had picked up.
|
| > It requires users of your code to update all of their
| import statements throughout their code whenever you move
| your hosting.
|
| This is a necessary cost of the item above. It can be
| somewhat annoying, but I believe this can be done with a one-
| line change to the go.mod. I'd much rather occasionally deal
| with this.
|
| > It requires you to physically move all code to a new folder
| in your version control if you want to increase the major
| version number.
|
| And the benefit of this is that legacy code will continue to
| compile into the future. I do tend to find this annoying, but
| it was explicit trade-off that was decided back when they
| were developing their packaging system.
|
| Packaging is a hard problem, with lots of trade-offs; I think
| Go has done a pretty good job.
|
| One way in which Go and Rust have it easier than Python or
| Node is that the former _only_ have to deal with developers;
| the latter have to deal with both developers _and_ users,
| whose requirements are often at odds with one another.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| People lose DNS names by accident all the time. It's also
| easy to typosquat many DNS domains, and even Github
| projects occasionally.
|
| Non-DNS-based packages don't have to be named "go-sqlite".
| You can easily require some namespacing, and even use DNS
| as a base for that, but having an abstraction over it that
| recognizes the specific needs of package management is
| better. For example, Maven packages are called things like
| org.apache.commons, and registering a new package requires
| control of an equivalent DNS domain. However, if you later
| lose control of that domain, the new owners don't simply
| get to replace the packet in Maven just because they snipes
| your domain.
|
| Go's choice to require full paths for import in each file
| is also not a direct implication of the previous item -
| they could have allowed the go.mod file to specify the path
| and a name, and then allow source files to import based on
| that name. Instead, this comes from Go tooling that existed
| before modules support, when the tooling would scour all
| files in your project to find dependencies.
|
| Moving code to a v2 dir does not specifically help (or
| hinder) with backwards compatibility. Old code can always
| simply keep using the old versions of the package anyway.
| It is also a very unpopular decision, with very few
| packages actually adopting v2 versions precisely because of
| this requirement, even when making major breaking changes.
| Even the team maintaing the Go protobuf bindings decided
| not to use v2 when they rehauled their code (opting instead
| to create a new v1 at a new location with minor versions
| starting at 1.20...).
|
| Sure, packaging is hard, but the Go team has chosen to go
| against the flow of essentially all other package managers,
| and instead of learning from their mistakes, they seem to
| have decided to make original mistakes all their own.
| jakewins wrote:
| Java enforces domain name ownership as well; I can't
| publish to maven central under io.netty.
|
| This removes a whole slew of attack surfaces that JS and
| Python have, and leverages an existing "prove you are who
| you say you are" infra
| jen20 wrote:
| Some of your criticism is reasonable, and I'm no fan of Go's
| module system as a standalone artifact, but much of your
| criticism is unfounded.
|
| > It requires you to physically move all code to a new folder
| in your version control if you want to increase the major
| version number.
|
| This is untrue.
|
| > It requires users of your code to update all of their
| import statements throughout their code whenever you move
| your hosting.
|
| This is only true if not using a vanity URL, but is sadly
| often the case.
|
| > It takes arcane magic to support multiple Go modules in the
| same repo.
|
| I don't know what you're calling arcane magic here, but we
| maintain repos at work with 6-7 go modules in without it
| being an issue whatsoever, and no "arcane magic" required, so
| I'm going to go ahead and say this is untrue too.
| Cieric wrote:
| Not the one you we're replying to, but I have an idea of
| the arcane magic he might be referring to. Back when I
| started learning Go I wanted to make a few example projects
| to test how well the language works, but I didn't want to
| push anything anywhere. When I tried to break my project
| into modules it ended up being that I needed to give them
| fake urls or something and then tell it to redirect the
| fake url to a folder instead. This[1] and this[2] gives a
| good example of the stuff I was running into at the time. I
| also realize that I should have probably been using sub-
| packages and not sub-modules, but coming from other
| languages I didn't realize they were suppose to be
| different. The thing that screwed with me most though was
| that there were half solutions for sub-modules to work so I
| kept using that terminology when searching google.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10687627/relative-
| import... [2]
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57806081/how-to-
| access-n...
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| Now a days you can use go workspaces to do this so you
| don't have to modify your go.mod files anymore.
| Cieric wrote:
| Thanks for the info, I'll look into that the next time I
| pick up go again.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > This is untrue. [needing to move code to a new folder to
| increase major version]
|
| I was indeed wrong, this is not necessary, though it is the
| original strong recommendation of how to do it from the
| original modules proposal.
|
| Still, slightly changing the critique to say that changing
| major version is a big hassle, and it requires touching all
| of your project files, and pointing out how bizarre the
| official recommendation is compared to other packaging
| systems keeps my point intact, I believe.
|
| > This is only true if not using a vanity URL, but is sadly
| often the case.
|
| Yes, I am aware that you can buy a custom DNS and point it
| to your repo to release under a better name, but it is
| almost never done (I think the only dependency the project
| I work on has that does this are Google's Go protobuf
| bindings and several k8s.io projects).
|
| > I don't know what you're calling arcane magic here, but
| we maintain repos at work with 6-7 go modules in without it
| being an issue whatsoever, and no "arcane magic" required,
| so I'm going to go ahead and say this is untrue too.
|
| If you want to maintain multiple Go modules in the same git
| repo, and you want others to be able to download them, you
| need to tag commits for each module you are releasing.
| These tags must be formatted to match the dir path to the
| specific module's go.mod file (which also "conveniently"
| becomes part of the module name), except for the afore-
| mentionet vX directories if you chose to follow the Go
| team's recommendations for major versions. Then, for local
| development, you also need each go.mod to contain a REPLACE
| directive for each other module inside the same repo (or
| maybe directives in a go.work file, or who knows what
| else). Overall, this ends up creating lots and lots of
| useless tags, and is the definition of what I'd call
| arcane.
|
| You'll not find the tag format in any "getting started"
| doc, and you'll not get any help from go mod itself if you
| get any of this wrong - just some "not found" style errors.
|
| Edit: oh, and I should note: I have no idea how this is
| supposed to be done if your repo is not in Git, even though
| go modules are supposed to support other VCSs too.
| skovati wrote:
| Interesting read on the official golang.org proxy DoSing
| git.sr.ht
|
| https://sourcehut.org/blog/2023-01-09-gomodulemirror/
| folex wrote:
| Being in the Rust full time for last 2 or 3 years: it is quite
| a pain to setup a release process for big Rust workspace.
|
| Version incrementing, packaging wasms, dancing around code
| generation - all doable, but not standardized.
|
| There's a release-please to automate all that, but it's not an
| easy task to set it up in all of your repos.
|
| Besides, if in addition to Rust projects, you have projects in
| other languages like JavaScript, then you have to do it twice
| and struggle with understanding all of the package management
| systems provided by all languages you have.
|
| A single swiss-army-knife package manager would be amazing.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Idk about Go, but Rust's cargo seems nice, clean yet powerful.
|
| That was my impression some time ago.
|
| But last week I attempted to compile a couple of (not very big)
| tools from cargo. And it ended up downloading hundreds of
| dependencies and gigabytes of packages.
|
| Looks like node_modules.jpg all over again :(
| verdverm wrote:
| > Idk about Go
|
| I wrote a post highlighting Go's mod system:
| https://verdverm.com/go-mods/
|
| imo, it is the best designed dependency system I know of. One
| of the nice things is that Go uses a shared module cache so
| there is only one copy on your computer when multiple
| projects use the same dependency@version
| omgtehlion wrote:
| I think, this is not a problem with package manager per se.
| But with extremities of coding culture. On one side of the
| spectrum is "NIH" and reinvent everything yourself. On the
| other side is: let's pull left-pad from package, because
| packages are good, we need MORE PACKAGES.
|
| The best solution always lies somewhere in the middle. But
| finding this "middle" (and adhering to this approach) is
| the hard part.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think I'm on the NIH side of things. Not because I like
| inventing things (well, partially), but because of the
| security problem [0].
|
| I don't see it being talked about here, either. Our
| current system of pulling in packages made by random
| people on the internet is going to burn us. We assume
| that everyone who creates a package is an honest,
| reliable, developer who will not inject malicious code
| into their package. This assumption is similar to the
| assumptions we made around SMTP, HTTP, DNS, and every
| other internet protocol. Turns out we were wrong and
| surprise! you can't trust people on the internet.
|
| I'm not sure if we can solve this with package managers.
| But package managers are part of the culture that has
| created this problem, and are probably a reasonable
| starting point to try and address it.
|
| [0]:https://david-gilbertson.medium.com/im-harvesting-
| credit-car...
| Groxx wrote:
| I really like a lot of the _distribution- and safety-
| related_ decisions Go modules made. Domain names and the
| proxy+sumdb are wonderfully clear, flexible, and scalable,
| and I think we 'll see copies of it in _many_ future
| languages.
|
| The rest of the stuff around modules, like crippled
| constraints, zero control over contents (which they have
| changed!), and completely non-existent "x is available,
| upgrade" or release tooling: constant, unnecessary pain,
| and it'll be inflicting serious damage on the ecosystem for
| many years to come.
| verdverm wrote:
| > crippled constraints
|
| Do you mean ranges on dep versions? The way it is
| currently, the version you set is the minimum, and the
| algo finds the highest minimum set across all deps and
| uses that.
|
| If ranges were introduced, you'd end up with an NP hard
| problem and need a SAT solver for your deps again
|
| > Release tooling
|
| What are you looking for here? Libraries only need to
| push a git tag, binaries do require a bit of work, but
| Goreleaser fills that pretty nicely. It would seem hard
| to standard where binaries would be pushed
|
| > completely non-existent "x is available, upgrade"
|
| https://go.dev/doc/modules/managing-
| dependencies#discovering...
|
| "go list -m -u all"
| junon wrote:
| As someone who contributed somewhat extensively to the
| node_modules problem early on, Cargo is definitely better
| than the JS ecosystem in this regard.
|
| Further, another major difference is that you don't need
| those dependencies after you've built. You can blow them
| away. Doing that with node is not as straightforward, and in
| many cases, not possible.
| Vosporos wrote:
| You might want to check PackagingCon
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdX1XXpLFYY&list=PLl386dCR5Q...
| Someone wrote:
| If you let everyone and their dog create and maintain packages
| and package dependencies and leave it to them to declare
| forward/backward compatibility between versions of packages, and
| your package manager ends up being popular, I think it's
| unavoidable that you end up with a mess.
|
| Foo may not be updated for Bar 2.0, while the Baz you use states
| it needs it, Bar 3.0 may incorrectly declare to be a 100% stand-
| in for anything between Bar 1.5 and Bar 3.0, Baz and Qux may
| contain similar functions that would better be part of their
| shared dependency Quux, etc.
|
| Tooling can make navigating that mess more or less difficult, but
| the mess still is there.
| rklaehn wrote:
| I find cargo (rust package manager) relatively pleasant to use.
| It's not perfect, but it also is not a constant source of
| confusion like sbt (scala package manger) was back when I did
| scala.
|
| In the long term, I think the whole notion of a "package" is
| obsolete. In unison https://www.unison-lang.org/ , code is just a
| content-addressed merkle tree. So dependencies are both more
| precise and more fine grained than packages.
|
| E.g. if there is a new version of a library, but the part of the
| library that you actually use is unchanged, unison will detect
| this and not trigger a full rebuild.
|
| The whole notion of a package becomes less important.
| hiljusti wrote:
| Cargo and Leiningen are the only two build/package tools I've
| used that are legitimately pleasant and unobtrusive. (And Cargo
| is more pleasant than Leiningen but I think that's the rest of
| the toolchain like rustc, clippy, etc)
|
| Correlation is not causation, but some food for thought is that
| Rust and Clojure are also consistently the top two languages in
| Stack Overflow survey "most-loved languages" lists.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| > See JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or C/C++.
|
| I feel like you've picked the 3 worst ecosystems as an example.
|
| Java has a wonderful ecosystem. You can use Maven/Gradle/Bazel as
| a dependency manager/build tool. All support the Maven repository
| format. Packages are published as jars and easily consumed. Of
| course you can still end up in dependency hell and you should
| take steps to mitigate those issues, but I'm quite happy with it.
|
| > As a result, we keep building new variants and features, until
| we end up with <script>, require(), import, npm, yarn, pnpm,
| (py)?(v|virtual|pip)?env, (ana)?conda, easy_install, eggs and
| wheels ...
|
| IMO the problem here is that there isn't a monopoly and its easy
| to swap in a replacement. JavaScript/Python developers are happy
| (or willing) to try something new, so new alternatives are
| created. Convincing a Java developer to try a new build system is
| difficult, so changes are made to existing systems rather than
| creating new ones.
|
| Go and Rust are two other systems that work well and are
| (almost?) universally adopted. They come with the language and
| there is little reason to look around.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| > JavaScript/Python developers are happy (or willing) to try
| something new, so new alternatives are created.
|
| FWIW as far as JavaScript on NodeJS goes, npm did set the
| standard quite firmly. You can also use yarn or pnpm, which
| promise improvements over npm while using the same package
| metadata (`package.json`) and produce npm-compatible structures
| in the same subdirectory (`node_modules`), so overall the user
| experience is muche like going from `sudo apt-get install` to
| the newer, more polished and otherwise largely equivalent `sudo
| apt install`.
| choeger wrote:
| We have such a theory, it's called "modules". But unfortunately,
| modules are even less popular than proper typesystems have been
| for decades.
|
| It's no coincidence that Rust (which has basically copied
| Haskell's type system to a large degree) and Julia (which is
| essentially a Lisp in disguise) have somewhat sound packaging
| systems. C/C++ does not even have a tidy core language, let alone
| proper modules (yes, yes, C++ modules might change that, but they
| are still a complex mix of templates and normal code).
| pastage wrote:
| I do not understand what you mean by modules, and how Rust and
| not Java or Python is helped by this.
| simiones wrote:
| Modules typically refers to a unit of code that packages
| together several types and functions (and/or other top-level
| concepts in your language, e.g. macros, templates,
| metaclasses, namespaces, packages) with an explicitly
| declared public interface, while still allowing these types
| and functions to have additional internal APIs that are not
| exposed. A module has to declare what other modules it
| depends on explicitly.
|
| The public interface of a module has to be explicit enough
| that a compiler for that language only needs the public
| interface description of that module to compile code that
| depends on it.
|
| A good example of the most widely used and successful module
| system is C compiled libraries. The header files represent
| the public description of a library (or, for dynamic linking,
| the .so/.dll itself embeds this info as well), and a C
| compiler only requires these header files to be able to
| compile dependent code and later link the two. It is also
| impossible to access non-public members of the library from
| standard C (without resorting to direct memory access, of
| course).
|
| Java packages don't have these properties because of two
| problems: there is no way to indicate dependencies between
| packages, and there is no standard way to have a bundle that
| corresponds to a package (since different .jar files can all
| load classes into the same package). The Java module system
| was created specifically to address these problems (and is
| still not fully adopted throughout the ecosystem).
|
| C++ breaks C's module system because of its heavy reliance on
| templates, which have to be entirely declared in the public
| API and can't have any internal API of their own; and because
| the compiler needs to know the total size of a class,
| including the size of its private members, to compile any
| code which references objects of that class.
|
| For Python, I'm honestly not sure if Python packages fit this
| definition of a module or not.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > C++ breaks C's module system because of its heavy
| reliance on templates, which have to be entirely declared
| in the public API and can't have any internal API of their
| own; and because the compiler needs to know the total size
| of a class, including the size of its private members, to
| compile any code which references objects of that class.
|
| Other languages with generics and modules do just fine by
| having the required metadata on the module, e.g. Eiffel,
| Modula-3, Ada, OCaml,..., which is what C++20 modules do as
| well.
|
| I have been using C++ modules on VC++ for quite some time,
| and while there are still some warts on the overall
| experience, they work quite alright.
| simiones wrote:
| Sure, I should have said "C++ before the modules
| feature". I was thinking more to explain why the modules
| feature was required at all (when it's not really
| required too much for C).
|
| Also, C# Assemblies solved this problem for generics too,
| for a more mainstream example.
| icelancer wrote:
| I just spent a few hours in npm/node/heroku hell, so... yeah.
| It's awful.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Because most developers don't learn from other projects and redo
| the same mistakes.
|
| It's a form of not-invented-here syndrome and you can see it in
| all the comments defending their favorite language..
|
| > we apparently have no "package management theory".
|
| Apparently. In reality there's been plenty of research - and for
| decades - that is not being used.
| austinjp wrote:
| > In reality there's been plenty of research - and for decades
| - that is not being used.
|
| Can you link what you're referring to? Genuine request, I'm
| curious and keen to learn more.
| anthk wrote:
| Perl users have been using CPAN for decades.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Pythoners have themselves to blame.
|
| The worst thing that happened to Python was that distributions
| like Red Hat not only shipped Python as an rpm but shipped system
| scripts in Python. This made it practically impossible to upgrade
| the system Python without breaking scripts and is fundamentally
| incompatible with how Python packaging works. (You are just one
| 'sudo pip install' from breaking your system)
|
| Like people who are impressed with ChatGPT (wow that answer
| seemed so confident even if it is wrong), Pythoners
| systematically mistake footguns for solutions. For instance, use
| 'pip install --user' and now the package you've included is
| visible when you type 'python', 'python3', use a venv, conda,
| whatever. I've had people tell me that having a 'python3' is the
| best idea anyone's had since Solomon proposed cutting a baby in
| half, but if you stop and think you realize that pretty soon you
| have 'python3', 'python3.5' (broken), 'python3.6' (maybe broken),
| 'python3.7', 'python3.8', 'python3.9', ...
|
| I would say venv's really solve the problem with the exception
| that you can currently trash all your venv's with 'pip install
| --user'.
|
| The trouble is that people who are bothered by this stop using
| Python, the people who are still using Python are people who have
| difficulty perceiving the nature of the problem never mind that
| there is a problem.
|
| The algorithm used by pip to resolve packages is not sound. It
| goes off trying to install things and can only find out late in
| the game that it installed a package which is not compatible with
| another package. This can be solidly blamed on the egg package
| format which can only determine the dependencies of a package
| when it tries to install it by running a setup.py. This is nice
| because it can adapt to the environment dynamically (say add a
| timezone db on windows) but it is not like Java's maven that
| knows it has a consistent solution before it downloads the JARs.
|
| I'm pretty sure you could make a Python package manager that
| works like Maven if it only installed wheels because you can read
| the directory of a wheel (a ZIP file) with one or two http range
| requests and then read the dependency data with another http
| range request. Poetry doesn't quite do this. Poetry does a lot
| better than pip does, but whatever it does takes a really,
| really, really, long time.
|
| Poetry might be the best thing going but it has the fundamental
| flaw of trying to be a 95% or 98% solution which, to the
| Pythoner, sounds like a good idea. The trouble is that writing
| programs that are 98% is to computer science what Bigfoot is to
| zoology or ESP is to psychology. The gap between that and 100% is
| not 2% but more like 200% because figuring out exactly what is
| wrong with the conceptual model and working around it in a hard
| case is at best like pushing a bubble under a rug. Imagine how
| much trouble you could get into with a 98% correct sort or binary
| search algorithm... It's a place where professional developers
| just don't want to go.
|
| Java has the advantage of extreme xenophobia and bad feelings all
| around that mean that: (1) people don't expect to link very much
| C code into Java, and (2) people don't feel entitled to use the
| Java bundled with their Linux system and have it really work.
| Because of (1), Java code tends to be self-sufficient and avoids
| a whole sector of 'dependency hell' involving .so and .dll files.
| Because of (2) people feel both responsible and empowered to
| install a JDK that works unlike the typical who Pythoner doesn't.
|
| Don't think that docker helps in any way, what I found what that
| Docker accelerates the ability of Pythoner to find pythons that
| are broken in odd ways, configured with strange default character
| sets and such.
|
| Javascript has the nice feature that file A can import from
| package version B and file C can import from package version D so
| that the 'diamond dependency' problems that are so terrible in
| Java (Like that bug in Guava post-13 that broke HDFS) and still
| problematic in Python rarely produce problems. (You only have
| problems if an object from A migrates to C _and_ it gets used in
| incompatible way, contrast that to Java where probably the
| classloader blows up)
|
| I was wishing over the weekend that Python had something like
| that because once more I have been building and packaging machine
| learning models for inference in Python and it would be really
| sweet to pack up a model that uses scikit-learn or pytorch or
| whatever into a Python package and then load it into a web server
| or a batch job. It's totally practical to do that, using joblib
| to unpickle a few MB of code. Once you end up needing two
| different versions of pytorch though, you are really screwed.
| pxc wrote:
| This is a very good rant, worth bookmarking to refer others to
| who are curious about packaging problems
| al2o3cr wrote:
| TBH I think you may just have a sampling problem - the JS and
| Python spaces have two of the messiest package-management
| ecosystems.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > Is it just a "law of software" that this must happen to any
| successful language? Or are there examples of where this it has
| not happened, and what can we learn from them?
|
| Dotnet has nuget and it is quite pleasant to use in my
| experience. I think the big deal is having some standardized way
| of managing them as a layer on top. In teh dotnet case, it is
| having the solution pull in the nuget packages, rather than
| individual files. Along with having a standardized way to index
| available packages from each source (In this case the nuget json)
| jonfw wrote:
| I am starting to see some consistency these days. I mostly work
| in Go, so I'm not intimately familiar with the state of the art
| in other languages, but it looks like most ecosystems have a tool
| that support this flow.
|
| A declarative (go.mod) file that always installs the same
| dependencies every build, a tool to update that lock file (go mod
| tidy), and an indication in the source that indicates how the
| dependency is being used (import).
| groestl wrote:
| And a way to locally override a dependency to conveniently work
| on multiple parts at the same time (go.work)
| leetrout wrote:
| This is Go Workspaces for those unfamiliar
|
| https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/workspaces
| [deleted]
| Falkon1313 wrote:
| I don't see many complaints about Free Pascal/Delphi. You want a
| unit? Get it, add it, use it.
|
| No 3rd party Rube Goldberg contraption needed. No package
| managers or dependency resolvers, no special build tooling, no
| lock files. No constantly having to run updates and figure out
| what they broke by way of transitive dependencies. Just get what
| you need and use it.
|
| I haven't, however, developed enough professionally with it to
| know how that plays out long-term in practice. But I'd have to
| imagine it would compare favorably to just about everything else
| nowadays. The things I've been using for the last couple of
| decades are all pretty abysmal in comparison.
|
| I'd say they were a solution in search of a problem, but people
| have managed to create a problem to justify the solution, which
| really still isn't very good. At least, not nearly as good as the
| simple get, add, use pattern.
| dagw wrote:
| There are two problems that make package management hard,
| neither which are tackled by a "Get it, add it, use it"
| approach. Dealing with cross platform issues and package
| dependencies. If we ignore these two problems then package
| management is easy. We could make a 'rule' that packages cannot
| depend on other packages, and that packages only support the
| single OS/CPU combo they were originally developed for, but
| that will cause other problems.
| chubot wrote:
| It's because the software ITSELF is structured poorly, not just
| the package managers
|
| Big pyramids of dependencies are inherently fragile (whether
| dynamically or statically typed)
|
| Dependency inversion can make it so that your dependency tree is
| exactly 1 deep, and it's dynamically wired together in main()
|
| But most people don't write code in that style. It takes extra
| effort
| Quequau wrote:
| Rube Goldberg was a prophet.
| onion2k wrote:
| Scope creep.
| derefr wrote:
| What I really want to know, is why _package development_ is such
| a Rube Goldberg machine. Not for programming-language packages,
| per se, but rather for OS packages _of_ simple programming-
| language packages.
|
| Have you tried to package a random Python/Ruby/etc. CLI program,
| for Debian? Or how about for Homebrew? Each one involves a
| cacophony of PL scripts calling shell-scripts calling PL scripts,
| and internal/undocumented packager subcommands calling other
| internal/undocumented packager subcommands. It takes ~forever to
| do a checked build of a package in these systems, and 99% of it
| is just because of how spread out the implementation of such
| checks is over 100 different components implemented at different
| times by different people. It could all be vastly simplified by
| reimplementing all the checks and transforms in a single pass
| that gradually builds up an in-memory state, making assertions
| about it and transforming it as it goes, and then emitting it if
| everything works out. You know -- like a compiler.
| megous wrote:
| That's a Debian specific quirk. There are simpler, more
| cohesive package management systems, like eg. pacman, where
| package maintainers's tools mastery is not an arcane art in
| itself.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Your mistake is in the use of the word "every" when in fact
| you've only considered a few. Rust, for instance, uses cargo for
| packaging and it's probably the most intuitive part of Rust (/s).
| tbarone wrote:
| I'll say that on the whole it _seems_ to be getting better with
| time. Most people have already mentioned Rust / Go as examples
| of this.
|
| I do agree it is an issue. Doing away with node_modules
| completely on the last rails 7 app I worked on was the most
| cathartic experience of my life.
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