software - multiple version installs (any distro developers here?)

[John Newman]

> On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:12 AM, Tom <tom at 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.:
> 
> https://xkcd.com/927/  :)
> 
>> 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