

Packaging and the tide of history - inopinatus
http://vagabond.github.io/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-the-tide-of-history/

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inopinatus
This was a followup to _Packagers don 't know best_
[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920921)].
I think the writer, who received considerable criticism here on HN, really
just dug his trench a little deeper with this. The whole theme - and the
fundamental us-vs-them tone of the article, as though packagers weren't
themselves developers (they very often are) - really intensifies a divide that
the DevOps movement tries to resolve; moreover, the example of bundler,
shrinkwrap et al simply demonstrates the unfortunate case of NIH that many
developers have about packaging: they are, in an echo of Greenspun's tenth
rule, doomed to reinvent it.

The fact is that application publishers cannot be relied upon to maintain
upstream currency of bundled components, and this is the motivation for
disaggregation. System administrators are always more interested in
maintaining the integrity of their servers and reliability of their services -
especially the security facets thereof - than in pandering to a developer who,
experience tells us, has a decent chance of not being around in a year's time.

The best integration I have yet seen of language-specific and OS-level
packaging is in FreeBSD's BSDPAN framework for Perl, where language-installed
modules automatically appear in the package database so that their lifecycle
can be properly managed. That's a much more constructive solution that
actually tries to bridge the divide, and I would like to see more of it.

