>>7778
>Packaging should be as easy as clicking a fucking button, yet it isn't.
Not a packager myself, but in my experience "./configure && make && make install"-ing tarballs the most annoying pitfall by far compared to using a (whether binary or source based) package manager is the inability to automagically retrieve (or even enumerate a comprehensive list of!) deps. As I mentioned upthread, I'm aware of at least one piece of software that attempted to solve this problem:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutoApt
Of course, it died almost a decade ago.
>I don't mind flatpak's existence, but I do believe it's a broken remedy for a broken system, and it makes software devs even more greedy about their compliance.
I do. Ditto anything using the same placebo containerization (e.g.: AppImage, Snap, Steam) on the basis that they are a tumerous burden on billions of end-users as well as an inherent attack against the control of the OS over their installed software and its interoperability. HOWEVER, your complaints about your woes arising almost entirely from the sloppiness of the least competent devs makes me think something almost exactly inverted from Flatpak, solely intended for devs, would be useful:
>most of the time is spent fixing broken build systems and software
>is downloading shit from the internet resulting in inconsistent builds
>is using some language/framework that breaks any of the former (e.g. the cancer that are rust and go requiring you to use their package managers).
>give the dev a sandbox to fuck up anything in, and don't let them touch the system
>Add some docker magic and you would even get the binaries and publish the repos
And what >>4796 said:
>You could do all your compilation in a barebones CentOS/Rocky/Alma VM (or a chroot but I haven't tested that)
As a last resort to get sloppy open source devs in line, what if in addition to tarballs, it became a common requirement to offer some sort of standardized diff'd VM image capable of building hash verified binaries without Internet access, reissued for each release? All tools, all deps, all caches, all configs, bundled together and ready to run. It would be useful in a variety of contexts, such as forcing devs to make sure they could get their software to build in something other than their own environment, allowing other devs to figure out how to reproduce bad devs' environments, and as a last resort for quickly getting a nightly buildbot on its feet.