On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 01:30:17PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
A major distro heading that way (e.g. Debian) might encourage developers to increase the configurability of their own software perhaps?
Developers != distro|package maintainers, and free software should be portable and not distro specific. So, developers wouldn't have anything to do here, only maintainers.
Ahah! Yes so we need a new default packaging/ installation format to be supported by RPM and DPKG, to support the better way, e.g.:
So look into /var/lib/dpkg/info - that's heading for 9K files on my system - and this is a relatively fresh install (<12months)!
That's not human friendly.
Because humans are not the intended audience for this stuff. Use dpkg -l [| less or the like].
The point is just multiple versions parallel installs, that's all.
There are already solutions for this, e.g. look at PC-BSDs packages. Or use a container. Or compile yourself and set --prefix accordingly.
Given my experience, your "nobody wants" is too broad by at least 1 :)
You're free to start a new project. Maybe others will join, maybe not. best, Tom