Re: [libreplanet-discuss] observation re. build systems

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Fri, Jan 01, 2016 at 11:09:52 -0800, Kip Warner wrote:
> Agreed. I also really don't see them as "developers". If they were,
> they would have more knowledge and hopefully act more responsibly.

That statement is a bit unfair; many are introduced to programming
through these communities and simply would not know better, or see these
recommendations from countless sources and conclude that this is the
standard and proper way of doing things.  Those are practices encouraged
(sometimes demanded) by the wider community or the package managers
themselves.

I'd say that your average programmer doesn't care or know much about
packaging, aside from what their package manager tells them to do.  To
most people, something like `npm install -g package` which triggers
compilation and installation seems very convenient and to be a great
idea.  Remember: they're probably dealing with others in the same
community, not distro package maintainers or sysadmins.

NPM doesn't make that easy, either---it's designed to load sometimes
hundreds of individual modules on demand, not install (or even build)
pre-built distribution tarballs.  Which is great for development, but
people don't realize that this is terrible for installation on
non-development systems.

I'm by no means defending the practice (it's a terrible situation).  But
it's not an issue of programmer competence, IMO; it's cultural in many
cases---be it ignorant or intentionally dismissive.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker | GNU Maintainer
https://mikegerwitz.com
FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB

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