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A comment on Limiting the power of package installation in Debian. Parent comment

Re:Limiting the power of package installation in Debian by dTal on Friday November 16, 2018 @09:25AM (#18468906)
Because the scope of 'certain reindexing actions' is potentially unbounded. Suppose you have a large piece of software that uses plugins, which it finds by reading a 'plugins.xml' file. Now, when you install a plugin from the package manager, you need to modify 'plugins.xml' in some arbitrary fashion. You simply cannot constrain the entire software world to operate in a file-oriented, declarative manner.
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Re:Limiting the power of package installation in Debian by jjnoakes on Friday November 16, 2018 @10:18AM (#18469258)
> You simply cannot constrain the entire software world to operate in a file-oriented, declarative manner.

You can, if the community wants to go in that direction.

Ideally the software which loads "plugins.xml" is updated to support a conf.d-like directory full of "plugin-pkg1.xml" through "plugin-pkgN.xml", each owned by separate packages. Many OSS projects have done this.

If that's not possible (closed-source, too much work, whatever) then it seems simple enough to build a separate XML-merging tool that the package manager invokes which combines the separate XML files during package installation.

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Re:Limiting the power of package installation in Debian by dTal on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:22PM (#18472075)
You're just saying, "I can constrain whatever I want!".

Which is fine and all, but don't expect users to flock to your distribution that doesn't support $SOFTWARE because you decided they do things wrong.

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Re:Limiting the power of package installation in Debian by Macha on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:01PM (#18470515)
And JSON-merging and YAML-merging and TOML-merging and .bashrc merging and .properties merging and ...
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Re:Limiting the power of package installation in Debian by geocar on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:36PM (#18470826)
... and hopefully programmers realise that building all those things and shipping them is harder than just supporting a directory with the plugins in it. Or maybe even just punt with a wrapper that does it at startup.

Honestly: the defence of shit software and user-hostile developers never ceases to amaze me.

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