Re: [Userops] Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis.

[Dave Crossland]

On 8 April 2015 at 11:22, Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> wrote:

 - Language packaging for deployment needs to die.  Yes, I say this as a
   project that advocates that very route.  We're doing it wrong, and
   I want to change it.
   (Language packaging for development though: that's great!)

I think this is what set me off ranting about your gestalt thinking :)

If language packaging sucks for deployment, it sucks for development.

Language packaging is abstracting the operating system, so the installation of a local package is the same on win/gnu/osx/illumos when these systems are running on bare metal.

Now containers are here, it's an inappropriate level of abstraction, because developers need to deploy their overall systems, which are often composed of programs in various languages.

This leads to, as Dave Thompson just said, using a set of language packaging systems.

This is just about bearable when just installing individual packages on your special snowflake metal, typically the one by your legs with a cute hostname.

But if your computers have a personal hostname instead of an impersonal one, that's another tell of deprecated pre-container thinking.

Containers are about eliminating all the on disk differences between development, CI, qa, and operational deployment.

It should be whales all the way down.

Then moving server to server is easy, because it's a common (several times a day) thing you do. If you can't do it that frequently and rapidly, it's not easy enough.