On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:12 AM, Tom <tom@vondein.org> wrote:
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
Docker might be a little big for every binary in the system ;). I tend to agree that the base system is ok without being a bunch of symlinks, but doing something like this for /usr/local does work great on OSX with homebrew (which is written in ruby btw) John