Re:Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
by mikepurvis on Saturday April 17, 2021 @02:20PM
(#26846290)
There's also a lot of sub-ecosystem issues which are more prominent on Linux, like the long-standing surprise that NPM doesn't have a global rc file in /etc:
The argument from the maintainer is reasonable that distros can just patch it, but realistically, everyone wants a newer version of things than what their distros ship—a similar tug-of-war ends up happening in the Python world, where distros like Ubuntu and Debian ship patched versions of pip/setuptools, and then users are encouraged to self-upgrade those tools to the upstream versions.
Anyway, this kind of thing isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it is just a pretty different experience from Mac or Windows where you tend to have things be more self contained, like "here's where my Python installation lives because it's the path I put in the box when I ran setup.exe."
https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/533
The argument from the maintainer is reasonable that distros can just patch it, but realistically, everyone wants a newer version of things than what their distros ship—a similar tug-of-war ends up happening in the Python world, where distros like Ubuntu and Debian ship patched versions of pip/setuptools, and then users are encouraged to self-upgrade those tools to the upstream versions.
Anyway, this kind of thing isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it is just a pretty different experience from Mac or Windows where you tend to have things be more self contained, like "here's where my Python installation lives because it's the path I put in the box when I ran setup.exe."