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There was an anecdote from someone working at Microsoft in the early 2000s. The story says, Microsoft Office code due to legacy reasons stemming from the 90s was incredibly fragile and building it was a no easy feat. Office team had a bunch of carefully maintained build servers with carefully controlled version of Windows, MSVC compiler, and other software. Whenever a new build server was needed, they simply made a copy from an existing one (literally, copying the HDD contents) rather than install a system from scratch.

I heard this story from someone in my uni and I used to laugh at it, because surely having something like this today would be totally ludicrous. Now I see people use Docker and I don't laugh any more.

THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@PurpCat and of course nobody in Microsoft figured they could just put a wire between two pins on the motherboard. Or cross two wires, if that was an AT system.

Pawlicker 🐾😹
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@icon_of_computational_sin either AT or a PC-98 (same idea and power switch setup really), though some old models had the crackhead setup of "piece of plastic pushes a button on the PSU itself".
THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@Zerglingman motherfuckers who don't have package management is the majority of L'Eunuchs users out there.

Zerglingman
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@icon_of_computational_sin yeah lmao, pkgbuild go real brrrrrrrrrrrrrr
THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@Zerglingman ask your questions. I failed my telepathy class.

Zerglingman
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@icon_of_computational_sin You're starting to sound like a nigger.
You're the one making accusations about package management not being good, but it is. If you don't have makepkg/pkgbuild, then yeah, that's a problem. But you can have that. It exists, and it's even being ported to other distros (LURE).
So... What's actually wrong with package management? Sounds like a skill issue to me.
Zerglingman
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@icon_of_computational_sin Fair enough. This is the sort of thing that made me interested in it in the first place, because that does sound nice; though in practice I do this anyway, because any package I have installed for development only tends to just not interfere with anything else. I am the sort of person that will look at you in confusion if you suggest developing against an old version of anything. Obviously I will update my software to adapt to changes in its dependencies. In general, I assume that updates are released for a good reason, and if I discover otherwise, I throw it straight into the bin.
Zerglingman
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@icon_of_computational_sin Can confirm that the standard for python and node is to use the language-specific package manager, I believe it is also the standard for rust. In all of these cases it is a mistake.
I am not familiar with cabal at all, but I fully expect it is being used as a package manager too.
So... If it is not a package manager, then yes, I would call it a bad package manager.
THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@Zerglingman they aren't package managers. You can repeat that a few times to get the idea. All these tools are supposed to do is to help you build your project. You must never use them to install software that you will actually use in your system.

Zerglingman
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@icon_of_computational_sin AND YET SOFTWARE SHIPS LIKE THIS
CONSTANTLY
BECAUSE MOTHERFUCKERS NEED PACKAGE MANAGEMENT
THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@Zerglingman people who ship software like this are dumbasses and need to be kicked in the balls. This fact doesn't make these tools bad, because these tools are designed to do a very specific job and they actually do it just fine, for the most part.

m0xEE ppc-musl
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@icon_of_computational_sin
Doesn't Docker counter precisely this, making container creation perfectly reproducible from scratch instead of just cloning machines' HDDs? :marseyhmm:
I mean you can still use updated versions of build tools in your environment, just change a single line in container description file and there you go. If things don't work as expected — just roll it back. Immutable infrastructure and all that shit.
Eric Zhang (Re-remastered)
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@m0xEE @icon_of_computational_sin Watch the video. I just use Docker to deploy things in 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes while polluting my fs.
THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
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@m0xEE no. You need to put a lot of effort to make docker build reproducible. Most of the time it's just some base image with some commands ran upon creation.

Bad Neighbor
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@icon_of_computational_sin I used to work with one of the architects of Exchange. This does not surprise me in the least.