package manager? seriously?

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

Ugh. I'm tired, I've been writing and doing stuff far too much this  
past week, and then people start bringing up "what's going to be  
9front's package manager" as if it were some kind of fait accompli,  
and instantly talking about "how are we going to have the package  
manager deal with config files?"

I think martian67 helped me organize my thoughts best when he said  
"packages enforce a certain structure on things." ... I don't if this  
will come across in text but what I really wanted to reply to that is  
"Oh! OH!! Ohhh yeeesss, let's ENFORCE STRUCTURE!!! STRUCTURE is  
GOOOOOOOD! Must have STRUCTURE!"

Plan 9's design is extremely good at making structure work in good,  
useful, non-limiting ways. What's the system which makes the most use  
of package management today? Gnu/Linux. What's the one system which  
employs structure in the very worst way possible throughout? Gnu/Linux.

Package managers are a big part of the disease. Dependency tracking  
helps create the longest and most brittle dependency chains. Config  
file management isn't management at all. Either you are managing the  
config files on your system or something else is, which way is it  
going to go?

Another big argument is package managers somehow stop things making a  
mess all over your system. Er, no, they provide a way for people to  
patch random shit to fit an arbitrary structure... Is "random shit"  
even remotely relevant in the context of 9front? For fuck's sake how  
much bullshit are we going to pile on this OS anyway? Without, you  
know, making it fit the OS first? Good grief people, THINK already.

Finally... "ohmigosh but the ONLY way you can possibly uninstall  
cleanly is with a package manager" argument, to which I will reply  
with two words: make uninstall. Plan 9 mkfiles  already have all the  
files they install listed, it shouldn't be hard to put an uninstall  
target in the files every mkfile sources. This isn't random bullshit  
made to work with crappy implementations of make, this is something  
for which we can make an uninstall target work already.

For those STILL in fucking lust with package managers, will you  
PLEASE stop thinking of 9front as a suitable platform for megalithic  
dinosaurian monstrosities?