Lua and Python

Posted Feb 12, 2020 19:31 UTC (Wed) by tau (subscriber, #79651)
In reply to: Lua and Python by NYKevin
Parent article: Lua and Python

Language-specific package managers greatly reduce the friction caused by importing third-party libraries. People like to make fun of JavaScript for using libraries containing a few dozen lines of code (that have comprehensive unit tests, non-obvious patches contributed for surprising edge cases, and lots of real-world testing) but this would be utterly impossible in a world where you had to wait for your library to get packaged by Red Hat and Debian, then wait again for Ubuntu to pick it up, and then wait a few years for that package to become available in the stable releases of all three distributions. Low-friction third party library ecosystems are a huge boost for developer productivity.

Also bad third party libraries can fall out of use, bad standard libraries are forever. Standard library code is also subject to the release cycles of its language runtime.

Lua and Python

Posted Feb 13, 2020 8:09 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

I think we agree: Language-specific package managers are essential for local development, and should not go away.

What I'm saying is that, assuming you eventually want your software installed on an end user's computer (i.e. your end users are not a subset of your developers), then you have to play the usual packaging game, or provide tarballs and make it the distro's problem. Telling end users to run pip install foo is not a great idea. Pip is a developer tool. It has a number of sharp edges; for the longest time, received wisdom was (and might still be?) "never run sudo pip, it will break your system."