The Most Prolific Packager For Alpine Linux Is Stepping Away
The Most Prolific Packager For Alpine Linux Is Stepping Away
Heads up if you're using Alpine images to host your services or run build pipelines. Alpine's packages are going to be less current unless some others maintainers are found to pick up the slack.
So she did half of the work
Yes, she literally did more commits than 347 other people. (every other maintainer this year)
I always assumed that the authors of a project also provided the packages. Apparently not, but I cannot imagine why...
One of the reasons for the #DevOps movement is developers see building and packaging as #notmyjob.
The task would historically fall on the most junior member of the team, who would make a pigs ear out of it due to complete lack of experience.
This is compounded by the issue that most C/C++ build systems don't really include dependency management.
Linux distributions have all tried to work out those dependency trees but they came up with slightly different solutions. This is why there are a few "root" distributions everything branches from.
That means developers have to learn about a few root distributions to design a deb/rpm/aur package systems to base their release around.
That is a considerable amount of learning in a subject most aren't interested in.
The real question is why don't package maintainers upstream a packaging solution?
That is a good question.
I suspect the answer can be found by looking at the Linux ecosystem.
20,000 opinions and 200 of them are willing to build their own distribution.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Unix and Linux, but there’s a metric ton of toxic personalities involved.
I’m sure a lot of it can be attributed to people having to be somewhere on the spectrum to even spend time contributing to free software on their own spare time, but a lot of people who build their own stuff tend to get quite attached to it as well.
Maybe all this friction actually is a good thing and it causes progress, but on the other hand I can’t help to think about where we could have been if everyone was pulling in the same direction.
There are a lot of distros to maintain packages for, hence a lot of work to be done. Developing a program is difficult enough, but add on the task of maintaining packages and the work goes up by an order of magnitude. That's why solutions like Snap and Flatpak were created, so packaging could be distro-agnostic.
For every distro there will be a group of package maintainers that handle this. The original authors will usually provide it in their own repo or a container build. But they (probably) won't have permission to host that on the official repo of every distro cause that's dangerous. You'd have all sorts of stability issues and dependency problems.