What do you call linux distro's package managers then? I mean, in distributions like Debian you can even download a package's source code with apt-get.
>What do you call linux distro's package managers then?
If you want to count them as package managers, they're by far the worst ones of all the well known languages (with some notable exceptions e.g. guix's and nixos's).
They're not portable between distributions or even different versions of the same distribution (!), since it's non-trivial to install older versions of libraries (or, hell, different versions of the same library at the same time). Not to mention that it's a very manual and tedious process in comparison to all the other language specific package manager. 'Dependency hell' is a problem virtually limited to distro package managers (and languages like C and C++ that depend on them).
Getting older, unmaintained C programs to run on Linux is an incredibly frustrating experience and I think a perfect demonstration of how the current distro package manager approach is wholly insufficient.
> If you want to count them as package managers, they're by far the worst ones of all the well known languages (with some notable exceptions e.g. guix's and nixos's).
The have the only feature I care about: cross-language dependency management.
Unless you are suggesting to reimplement everything in each language and then make users install ten different XML parser, SSL implementations, etc. just because not-implemented-in-my-favorite-language syndrome.
Meanwhile C is running strong since the 70s.
> the lack of package manager
What do you call linux distro's package managers then? I mean, in distributions like Debian you can even download a package's source code with apt-get.