[Caml-list] benefit of package management

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

David Brown wrote:
> Kenneth Knowles wrote:
>
> > Advanced package management is not particularly critical, however.
> > After countless years of windows, 2 years of Slackware, and about a
> > year of Gentoo, I'd say it only saves maybe an hour or two
> > per month.
> > (I'm using Windows and Slackware as examples of systems with no
> > significant automated package management: autoconf == wizard
> > installer)
>
> Interesting argument.  It would be hard to describe how much time good
> package management saves me, since without it, there would
> just be many
> things I wouldn't do.  If I were to try and upgrade things as
> frequently
> as I do now, I would probably spend 5-10 hours a week just doing the
> upgrades.

Agreed.  For instance, I just blew off doing anything with OCamlSDL
because there are too many underlying libraries that don't compile
terribly well on Windows.  Using Nebula will be more work up front
because it has no OCaml support, but since adding that support is my
strategic objective anyways, I figure I'll just roll up my sleeves and
get on with it.

I think package management is an infrastructure, deployment, and
language growth argument.  Python, for instance, has abundant packaged
libraries and hence a much better growth trajectory than OCaml.  You,
the converted, may not save a lot of time with package management,
because you know your needs and they aren't changing often.  For someone
exploring a language and making a decision to adopt it, the case use is
very different.  I wish I had a dollar for every open source project
I've downloaded and evaluated in the past 6 months; it would be a lot of
beer money and wouldn't remotely pay for the time spent.

Incidentally, if you're wondering what the consequences of eschewing an
off-the-shelf mentality are, look at the Lisp community.  They're dead
in the water, they're never going to convince anyone to adopt their
language(s) en masse.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed Mckenzie

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