Package managers... Worst part of linux

[catweazel]

I don't have many personal friends...

You have more than I do

[Sir Charles]

What rule says that only humans are people? Being an alien, for example, doesn't necessarily preclude the alien from also being a person.

The concept of personhood and upon what "entity" it is bestowed that is regarding it as a person within some politico-legal framework seems rather be quite a complex matter. There doesn't seem to exist anything natural or anything intrinsic in an entity that makes it to be regarded as a person. Shall we regard Androids as persons for example with legal rights like right to vote or hold them accountable for misconduct?

Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.

Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood are not universal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood

What's more, personhood is not an unalienable legal status of an entity. The history of our "civilization" attest to the fact that under certain circumstances one or other group of (human) entities have been regarded as "nonpersons" or others formerly enjoying the status being deprived of it.

A nonperson is a citizen or a member of a group who lacks, loses, or is forcibly denied social or legal status, especially basic human rights, or who effectively ceases to have a record of their existence within a society (damnatio memoriae), from a point of view of traceability, documentation, or existence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonperson

[karlchen]

Could it be that this thread has evolved in a direction which is offtopic with respect to "Package Managers" on Linux (Mint)?

[catweazel]

What rule says that only humans are people? Being an alien, for example, doesn't necessarily preclude the alien from also being a person.

The concept of personhood and upon what "entity" it is bestowed that is regarding it as a person within some politico-legal framework seems rather be quite a complex matter. There doesn't seem to exist anything natural or anything intrinsic in an entity that makes it to be regarded as a person. Shall we regard Androids as persons for example with legal rights like right to vote or hold them accountable for misconduct?

I wasn't talking in a legalistic sense whatsoever, nor in a dictionary definition sense, and I think that perhaps the question is extreme of what was intended to be conveyed. I don't like quoting wikipedia but this is the closest I could find to what I actually meant:

"A person is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person#Personhood

I left out the bits that didn't fit my intent.

Cheers.

[catweazel]

Could it be that this thread has evolved in a direction which is offtopic with respect to "Package Managers" on Linux (Mint)?

I was under the impression we had some leeway in the chat forums.

[shawnhcorey]

"oh look these guys support linux! I think I'll install!" *Gets tarball Everytime*

That's because you never heard of repository management. Yes, it's archaic and mostly undocumented. Improvements in it will relieve your prolems.

As for Snap, FlatPak, etc: https://xkcd.com/927/

[catweazel]

As for Snap, FlatPak, etc: https://xkcd.com/927/

lol - too true. Nice find.

[Sir Charles]

Could it be that this thread has evolved in a direction which is offtopic with respect to "Package Managers" on Linux (Mint)?

The subject being too interesting and too relevant to our times, and that not only when it comes to non-human entities but also to human ones as well, I just couldn't let the opportunity to go by without pointing to the complexity of the matter.

Sorry for cluttering the thread. This is after all "Chat about Linux"

[Portreve]

Honestly, I'm not a particularly big fan of self-contained application deployment systems (flatpaks, et al.) because to me that feels just like an end-run around distro-maintained repositories.

Now, let's say you had a company producing a non-free program (of which, btw, I'm not a fan, because I don't trust non-peer-reviewable / non-auditable code) and they wanted to build something where it could be more broadly distributed. Self-contained distributable software would make sense for that.

The thing is, with exceedingly few exceptions, I don't trust software that doesn't come from my own distro's repos, period.

Let's say you're a professional, or a business, and you need some particular program from the community which has not yet made it to your distro of choice's repos. What you should logically do is throw some money their way and say "I would like this app prioritized for distribution through you, and here's some bones to make it happen." It's not like the distros out there are going to stop doing what they usually do, but if you can make it worth their while to step-and-fetch a given program, check it out and go through all their usual processes, and then post it, that's cool. Besides, every additional program is not just a good thing for them, but a boon to everyone else.

The other thing, going back to the OP's point about having one common package management system, is there are architectural differences between distros, and as I understand the matter, as a distro, you have one of two basic paths to go down. First, you create a distro which, all other things aside, is built to handle a given package management system. Second, you create your own package management system. Again, there's architectural differences between distros which obviously are a result of specific end-goals of the various distro creators/maintainers. Distro X and Distro Y are, in fact, two different distros because what their builders want are two different things, QED.

[all41]

Could it be that this thread has evolved in a direction which is offtopic with respect to "Package Managers" on Linux (Mint)?

The op is expressing an opinion, therefore a certain amount of dither is to be expected.