Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft

Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft by wtetzner on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:00PM (#25077029)

How so? The version ends up being part of the type, so a type from two different versions of a given package are not compatible, which solves most if not all of the issues.

If a package is just using a particular library internally, I don’t see why the package manager should prevent using it with another library that depends on a different version.

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Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft by throwaway129013 on Friday November 13, 2020 @10:47AM (#25083440)

> I don’t see why the package manager should prevent using it with another library that depends on a different version.

I do. The main reason for Linux distributions to exists is to provide a development and running environment where:

- API/ABIs do not change for the whole lifetime of the distribution. No new features, no new bugs, no new vulnerabilities, so that your production code can run reliably for 5+ years.

- Vulnerabilities are fixed with minimally invasive patches.

- Vulnerabilities are fixed in reasonable times even if the upstream development stopped. Patches are well tested against the set of packages in the distribution.

You simply cannot have these 3 features together if a distribution ships 10 different version of each library.

It's already a ton of work to maintain packages in stable distributions.

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Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft by wtetzner on Friday November 13, 2020 @08:48PM (#25089605)

I’m confused by your comment. This is about a programming language package manager, not an OS package manager. Or was that just an example?

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