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View Poll Results: Universal Packaging Format of the Year
All I've found on alternative (less POSIX-like) OS distributions is some didn't work at all; others are super-annoying (like create visible folders in $HOME; ) they're not UNIX-style. Honestly I'd rather vote which is the WORST!
I prefer using a tarball format and packaging a statically linked program (as suggested by some of the project and discussions at https://suckless.org/ ). apk might be a good second choice. It would only work on Android systems or Linux systems with options like libhibris though.
The title, as it stands, is correct, for the choices given. Every one of those three is intended to be a 'universal' format in the sense that you can run them on any OS, regardless of which camp it belongs to.
Disagree I must.
You cannot "Just run" these packages.
At least some of the choices listed require you to install some sort of framework before you can use their so-called "universal" packages.
And that goes for all packages of all package management formats: you need the framework around it.
BTW, you can, for example, install APT on Archlinux. You can install it alongside pacman (I guess the opposite would also be possible). So APT is universal, too. Or "universal" is just a buzzword.
My favorite (/s) universal package is the DOSBox Docker image from here, https://registry.fedoraproject.org/ which is 1.7GB in size. And it's just DOSBox.
Agree with the others. src tarball and a makefile will suit me just fine.
I have no desire to see applications bundling loads of duplicated/out-of-date 3rd party libraries within them. We've seen the mess that causes with dlls in Windows-land.
Poll needs a "I completely reject the concept" option.
The old-school equivalent is not source tarballs. It's static linking.
Obviously source tarballs aren't binary packages, so we're comparing apples and oranges. I guess I just prefer oranges, and don't mind that they're sometimes awkward to peel.
There are good reasons people tend not to use static linking, and these "Universal packages" share many of those same issues. The solution is to build from source, not get all Heath Robinson with packaging. IMO.
Of course, it doesn't help that developers are increasingly using Heath Robinson inspired build-systems in their source these days making things harder to build.
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