"I bet it's node or ruby..." Sees .go file extension. "Oh nice, I never used a Go program before!" But then I am supposed to '$ go get github.com/ericchiang/pup' to install it.
Why does everything nowadays have to come with its own package manager? I like the separation between my home directory and the "system packages". I don't want to have to care for and update and separately backup ~/go, ~/.npm and so on and so forth.
This looks super nice, I especially like the detailed list of examples. Sorry for the rant.
edit: There are binaries in the "dist" directory, the readme just did not mention them. Thanks!
The reason is dependencies, and the fact that an operating system is a completely different kind of enterprise than a development platform. Platform libraries are released whenever they're ready to be released, but an operating system really needs a set release cycle, because it's got to ensure compatibility between everything installed.
It's way too much to ask of already overworked OS maintainers to handle all of the libraries of all of the development platforms and it's similarly too much to ask every library and application developer to maintain packages for all of the operating systems. You also can't have the One True Package Management system that works on all the different operating systems, it would just be too unwieldy to maintain. Even properly maintaining just .deb and .rpm packages is non-trivial and requires a certain amount of skill, compounding again the number of things developers need to be proficient in.
Packaging is a Really Hard Problem, and having every platform use its own packaging system is actually a huge step up from the way open source software used to be distributed, with tarballs and compilation instructions. The tarball was the package, and it was up to you to get it onto your system somehow. So have a little respect and appreciation, wouldya?
> It's way too much to ask of already overworked OS maintainers to handle all of the libraries of all of the development platforms
Not only that, but also different libraries can depend on "slightly" patched versions of the same library, making the kind of determinism an OS package manager needs completely impossible (or pointless, depending on who you're asking).
FWIW, once I realized that "./configure && make && sudo make install" was basically standard and worked the vast majority of the time, I really didn't mind it. In some ways I prefer it to platform-specific packages, which often lag development and include odd bugs and incompatibilities that don't bite you until run time.
It works fine for basic packages without many dependencies, but try a bigger package, where you have a few missing dependencies. Try installing those and you have more missing dependencies, repeat until you give up.
You're welcome to clone the repo yourself and build it. Go doesn't have a centralized package manager like npm, just a tool that automates downloading and building a repo. Nobody is forcing you to use it; it's a convenience.
Why does everything nowadays have to come with its own package manager? I like the separation between my home directory and the "system packages". I don't want to have to care for and update and separately backup ~/go, ~/.npm and so on and so forth.
This looks super nice, I especially like the detailed list of examples. Sorry for the rant.
edit: There are binaries in the "dist" directory, the readme just did not mention them. Thanks!