Today I had to downgrade fastapi from 0.114.0 to 0.112.4 to make a software work. And it just hit me - what if pip didn’t support 0.112.4 anymore? We would lose a good piece of software just because of that.
Of course, we can “freeze” the packages into an executable that will run for as long as the OS supports it. Which is a lot longer. But the executable is closed source. We can’t see the code that is run from an executable.
Therefore, there is a need for an alternative to which we still have access to the packages even after the program is built. That would make it safely unnecessary for pip to store all versions of all packages forever more.
Any ideas?
I hate them (seriously).
It’s basically a second distro inside your distro (try
du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/) and if something breaks (eg. last year mesa with my graphics card) it isn’t easy to identify were the problem is (because all libs update at the same time), plus you can’t just try a newer (or older) version of some lib as you would in your distro.Moreover, you can’t flatpak CLI tools (also servers and OS components, but I guess the ubuntu folks are the only ones who care about those).
This is why the marketing around flatpak bothers me. It’s touted as some kind of “universal Linux package manager” but Linux is just a kernel - all the stuff that apps depend on comes with the distro. So, in order for flatpaks to be “distro independent” they basically have to supply all the stuff that normally comes from the distro - effectively building a second distro on top of your existing one.
Nix and Guix are the same but at least I think they’re more up front that they are effectively distros that can run on top of your existing distro or as a standalone operating system directly on top of Linux.