Discussing a breaking change in Python’s setuptools.
The really interesting part is in the discussion section… and it shows once more how incredibly well-designed the GNU Guix package manager is – which solves these problems very very well, for arbitrary languages and with a fast growing distribution of, by now, about 50,000 packages.
I don’t get that people constantly complain that the Guix project does not distributes or actively supports distribution of binary, propietary software. That is like complaining that Apple does not sells their Laptop with Linux, Microsoft does not sells Google’s Chromebooks, or that Amazon does not distribute free eBooks from project Gutenberg, ScienceHub or O’Reilly.
And users can of course use the nonguix channel to get their non-free firmware or whatever, but they should not complain and demand that volunteers of other projects do more unpaid work. Instead, they should donate money or volunteer do do it themselves.
But guess what? I think these complaints come to a good part from companies which want to sell their proprietary software. Valve and Steams show that a company can very well sell software for Linux, with mutual benefit, but not by freeloading on volunteer work.
And one more thing, Guix allows to do exactly what Flatpaks etc. promise: Any company, as well as any lonely coder, team of scientists, or small FLOSS project, can build their own packages founded on a stable Guix base system, with libraries and everything, binary or from source, and distribute it from their own website in a company channel - just like any Emacs user can distribute his own, self-written Emacs extensions from a Web page. And thanks to the portability of the Guix package manager, this software can be installed on any Linux system, resting on a fully reproducible base.
I’ve seen good devs, helped by the team of guix themselves, fail for weeks and weeks at making it work as intended. That’s not a working software.
So, what exactly were they trying to do?
I don’t remember exactly, they were trying to package some dependencies they needed with guix and it was just a big headache.
So, how many users of Debian would even think about creating own packages?
I already have a hunch what went wrong: they were probably trying to package software that has no standard build system. This is painful because the standard tools, like GNU autotools for C programs, or cmake, or setuptools or its newer siblings for python, make sure that the right commands are used to build a package on whatever platform, and that, importantly, its components are installed into the right places. If they don’t use these, they will have a problem to build packages for any standard distribution.
Guix has support for all the mayor build systems (otherwise, it could not support building of 50000 packages).