Package Managers Are Evil

Summary

Package Managers are Evil n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The Standup Package managers (for programming languages) are evil. To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers mix up: A package Package Repositories Build Systems Package Managers These are all separate and can have no relation to one another. I have nothing wrong with packages, in fact Odin has packages built into the language. I have nothing wrong with repositories, as that’s how a lot of people discover new packages—a search engine, something I think everyone uses on a daily basis. Build systems are usually language dependent/specific, and for Odin I have tried minimize the need for a build system entirely (at least as a separate thing) where most projects will build with odin build ., which works due to the linking information being defined in the source code itself with the foreign system. This leaves package managers; what do they do? What do package managers do? Package managers download packages from a repositories, handles the dependencies and tries to fix them, and then it downloads its dependencies, and its dependencies, and its dependencies… and you can probably see where my criticism is going. This is the automation of dependency hell. The problem is that not everything needs to be automated, especially hell. Dependency hell is a real thing which anyone who has worked on a large project has experienced. Projects having thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dependencies where you don’t know if they work properly, where are the bugs, you don’t how anything is being handled—it’s awful. This the wrong thing to automate. You can do this manually, however it doesn’t stop you getting into hell, rather just slow you down, as you can put yourself into hell (in fact everyone puts themselves into hell voluntarily). The point is it makes you think how you get there, so if you have to download manuall...