this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Linked dependencies, for one. What if your distro uses uClibc? A different imagemagick version? What about LTS distros? Immutable distros?
What if who cares?
When I used to build app packages internally I also built packages for our own python and ruby versions for our in-house software. The motto was: “system packages are for system software”. We weren’t writing system software, we were writing business software and shipping it, so why be dependent on what Redhat or Debian provided?
Universal packages are just an extension of this philosophy, and is why things like docker and app stores are such a success. Burdening the user with getting system dependencies right is worse than the DLL hell of the old windows days.
Docker is a success in some ways, but it's not a silver bullet. It's a great way to make a 800 KiB program ship in a complex 300 MiB box.
If you had an entire operating system built with static links, it would be giant and ugly. You have to stop and think: if it's such a great idea, then why does pretty much every distro supply packages with dynamic links?
When shipping your own software, yes, you certainly want control over your own runtime. If you rely on an OS-supplied Ruby, for example, then when Ruby 3.3.0 comes out, your gems will need to be rebuilt, and it'll happen by surprise. A runtime and shipping stuff to your own infra is much different than packages responsible for running the operating system.
It's almost a silver bullet. 300mb is pretty modest by today's standards, and nix supports both bare metal and docker containers, and everything in between
Seems to me we need to bridge that gap - make nix smarter and more compatible with docker, and we get a fully featured desktop/dev environment that can be packaged directly into the minimal reproducible deployment package
And that sounds like a silver bullet to me
There's another aspect than size that I feel people overlook: security updates. When e.g. libcurl is duplicated in a million places, how do you update them all when a critical security issue is discovered in it? Who will update all the random flatpaks, snaps and docker images that happen to include it?
Yeah, there is definitely a delineation between system and user, and like most things the line will be fuzzy.
But in that end-user software space, 300mb is a pittance to pay for a minor system package update not breaking their favorite application, or a user not being able to use software because their distro is one version behind on libfoo.
Imagine a world where people say "I would use Linux, but I'm going to stay with Windows because Linux is too bloated."
I don't know where the recent surge of not wanting package dependencies is coming from. Folks even not wanting dynamic links. We're acting like Linux distros are somehow suddenly broken or impossible to maintain, yet there are hundreds of successful distros doing just that, and for decades.
You gotta have more empathy for the average person.
If the average person cared about binary size in terms of bloat, then being that smartphone apps are almost all statically linked, why are smartphones the most popular computer in the world?
To them bloat would feel more like apps you can’t delete, or say ads in a key gui component.
The bloat most people will care about in terms of Linux is facing down a software update prompt with 1000 packages and feeling anxiety over the last such dialog box destroying the use of their favorite apps.
I’m glad there are hundreds of successful distros, their complexities will serve well the hundreds of Linux desktop users.
This would be a bug in packaging. File a bug with the distro.
This doesn't happen as often as you think on a properly-configured system.
Usually people mean flatpak and other desktop-focused formats when talking about universal package formats.
Even docker images are usually built with traditionial package managers, except if they're built directly by Nix.
I agree that there won't be "the" package format, since they all have their tradeoffs. E.g. Nix updates need quite a bit of memory, so it isn't a good choice for resource constrained embedded use-cases.