Re:Announcing the new Rust package manager, Cargo
by fidotron on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @06:21AM
(#7421108)
I hate package managers too, but the worst I've ever seen were proprietary "solutions" in the games industry which did do awful tricks to make VS play ball.
It is no exaggeration to say people would avoid updating packages in their projects (i.e. the whole point of using a package manager was nullified) since they knew they would lose days or weeks merely getting back to where they were.
The problems with package management seem to be exponentially proportional to how clever the person implementing the system thought they were. Any more than a declarative list of dependencies per package that can be fully evaluated to a programmer readable dependency tree prior to a single package update and you've created a self sustaining beast that will consume more of your time than developing the actual product.
It is no exaggeration to say people would avoid updating packages in their projects (i.e. the whole point of using a package manager was nullified) since they knew they would lose days or weeks merely getting back to where they were.
The problems with package management seem to be exponentially proportional to how clever the person implementing the system thought they were. Any more than a declarative list of dependencies per package that can be fully evaluated to a programmer readable dependency tree prior to a single package update and you've created a self sustaining beast that will consume more of your time than developing the actual product.