The Dependency Hell Of Distro Development

Application packaging is a bit of a challenge especially when you're not just dealing with small apps but apps at the scale of a whole desktop environment and multiple at that.
Full Episode: • #223 The Linux Distro ...
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[@kuhluhOG]

That's something I noticed in general for a while now. The things considered good practice by software developers and distributors are growing apart more and more every year. About optional dependencies in build systems: CMake very much has support for optional dependencies. It even is the default. It it breaks from a missing one either you didn't use CMake correctly or made it non-optional on purpose (like adding REQUIRED to a find_package call). The reasoning for why less and less projects do that is also surprisingly simple: More and more developers consider optional dependencies a maintenance hell because of all the possible combinations (sure, one or two are fine, but let's say you have ten, that's 10^2 possible combinations which you theoretically have to test). About plugins, well, getting a plugin interface it extremely hard, it's like designing an API with a stable ABI for a shared library. Especially because of the requirement of a stable ABI most devs don't consider themselves being good enough for that. So most decide not to which is understandable I guess. But you can also see with new compiled languages, that most decide not to have a stable ABI, because as it turns out, designing a good programming languages is apparently easier than designing a good API with a stable ABI. Well, at least that's what it seems like these days.

[@rogo7330]

KDE packages are a plague. It's really a shame that they require a lot of different (even graphical) apps when you install only one of them. That's the only real reason why I avoid them entierly.

[@melitopiia4730]

Real, I can be downloading one KDE app and it comes with 500+ MB of dependencies

[@no_name4796]

Yeah, just install kde if you want kde apps. I personally installed kde for the settings, konsole and okular in my hyprland And i have a script to remove all kde bloat, it's like 30 packages with all their dependecies lol

[@Seyfullah-mx3cq]

@@no_name4796 could you share that? I use hyprland as well and using dolphin in hyprland feels rather suboptimal compared to using dolphin in KDE

[@jsizemo]

Honestly, 500Mb is not a lot in 2024. Also KDE has ALWAYS been this way (even though they may completely change the look and feel every 5 years, the large footprint is a given). None of this is surprising since KDE will always be the DE that’s more familiar to people coming from Windows, and it will end up just adopting the MSFT aesthetics

[@Seyfullah-mx3cq]

@@no_name4796 what parts of kde do you consider bloat? and what do you mean installing kde for the settings? the system settings app? i use hyprland as well, would be nice if you could share some insight, using dolphin on hyprland feels weird and suboptimal

[@genstian]

Don't wish for plugins, imagine 10k packages of kmail-maps, kmail-calender, kmail-sync and so on. And while just packing it all into a kmail-plguins is the logical choice, you bet distros will package all of that, and have the bug trackers be full of "can't find X feature", and the respons will be something stupid like kate-syntaxhighlights.

[@Artoooooor]

Why it cannot work like in Maven? App declares dependencies, multiple versions of the same lib coexist on one system, proper one gets downloaded, the app can declare repo it wants to download libs from...

[@fu886]

someone need to create the package so the lib will compile. maven you load compiled library in a relative stable abi/api jvm envrionement

[@saiv46]

Basically Nix

[@Artoooooor]

@@saiv46 Nix is almost there and I like it. My next distro will probably be NixOS. But still I'like possibility to install multiple versions of the same program side by side, without resorting to different commits on the main repo. Just by specifying the version I want to install/keep.

[@saiv46]

@@Artoooooor Umm, it's possible in NixOS to do exactly that.

[@adjbutler]

Imagine talking about dependency hell and not talking about NixOS!?!?

[@BUY_YOUTUB_VIEWS_608]

You're a game-changer.