this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I use Arch btw

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Superiority brings controversy (aprogrammerlife.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Re-creation of someone else's post because the original was removed and I found it funny when I first saw it

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All potentially fantastic ideas had the original author bothered to package in any of those formats. Much more common is the only release is a .deb built for an ancient version of Ubuntu, leading to my above frustrstions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
  1. Stop bothering with dead software.
  2. You can repackage old FOSS source code into any of those containers and install and use it that way. Nothing is stopping you, the tools are free and widely documented. You don't need to own the FOSS repository to repackage it, and actually a huge chunk of containers are packaged by people not affiliated with the development project of the software.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think we will become better served over time by using systems like the AUR or nix as it seems quite straightforward to make new software available with them. Both of those systems define the method a package should be built with, so even if the maintainer is long gone and the package hasn't been updated in a long time it will probably still be possible to build, or any changes needed to build it can be easily shared to save other people troubleshooting effort.

The drawbacks are: nix doesn't seem to have an elegant way to define that users or groups should be created (e.g. at least one package providing locate requires that) (though it does have at least one non-elegant way and one manual but less non-elegant way), and a package usable with pacman has lacked a definition of what version of every dependency it requires in at least one case where it would have been useful to me (even though that is possible apparently), so if anything made a backwards-incompatible change you may not be able to use the package manager alone to troubleshoot.