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?
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