On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 11:00:58PM +0100, Uriel wrote: > There are retarded standards for all kinds of crap, too bad that there > are thousands of standards and nobody follows them anyway. > > It is simple, the system user knows much better where shit is than the > developer can dream knowing, if the developer tries to guess he will > invariably fuck it up and waste even more of the user's time. > > If you want pre-chewed software, use whatever packaging system your OS > provides and let packagers deal with this, expecting the original > software developers to do it is extremely naive.
I think a lot on a concept of an OS-independent package manager destined not just to automate software installation but to make software development and distribution more consistent. (And to get rid of extra layer of software maintainance for each OS.) In this hypothetical concept, package is a unit of world-wide software distribution with some dependencies, but (sic!) dependencies are not just other packages - they are _interfaces_ provided by other packages, by the base system or whatever. This is a simple and evident idea based on an assumption that any system relies upon well-defined interfaces provided by other systems. Those interfaces are documented by humans in systems documentation or in well known standards. Unfortunately, this would work in an ideal world or at least a good one, not in this one. There are some good standards but they are a puny minority.
