It’s a bit of a mixed bag for me to be honest. I understand the desire to accurately package dependencies and maintain control over the dependencies without relying on a third party host, but I feel like everyone (whether that’s rust, node, python, ruby, etc) should just maintain a separate registry. As in not package it in the “Debian repos” but a debian mirror of crates.io that the debian maintainers maintain. To whit I can just download the Debian rust toolchain and have it be pointing at the Debian rust package mirror.

I’m sure there’s a lot of extra infra required for something like that, but I genuinely believe it’s more sane to try and get these languages to adopt that, rather than what we have now.

I could be easily swayed another way, but that’s how I feel currently.

Installing dependencies via the OS’ package manager is one of the worst experiences there is. I understand it for C, because the language is ancient and doesn’t have its own dependency manager.

But when developing, there are many dependencies you need that aren’t in the package manager. And when they are, they are often years old versions.

And in the case of python, it installs dependencies in the global scope, which means that you sometimes import that version instead of the pip one.

And in the case of python there’s the extra:

python main.py

python command not found

Ah. It must be python3 then. Now all the bash scripts are broken. Since it’s python3, I’m going to install packages with pip3:

pip3 install matplotlib

pip3 command not found

What?? So for python you need to put the 3, but for pip they removed it?

Ngl, python development is much less stressful on windows.