Over at Standalone Sysadmin we have an article titled Just what we need…another package manager. The article was inspired by the news that Rust is going to be receiving a package manager of its own called Cargo, and then goes off on how many different package mangers there are out there for a single system to use.
By single system, I’m talking about Linux.
I don’t have answers, but it does seem like there is a new package manager attached to each and every operating system, programming language, and even individual systems themselves (like Chef and Puppet). It is all terribly dizzying if you want to try to get anything done.
Like I said, no answers on my end.
Of course anyone can work out an ideal in their head that focuses around a single, system-wide package manager which any programming language or disparate system could hook into (like a super-charged apt or zypper), but I’m not even sure we would want that.
The hard part is that we have bought into the idea that choice is always good, and that more of something good is obviously better. This post asks whether that can always be true.