Default DC Tech is Just Bad
squarism.com2 pointsby squar1sm0 comments
wget https://whatever.io/latest.tgz
tar xzf latest.tgz
cd whatever-stable
./configure && make
sudo make install
Because of familiarity, we aren't going to be too worried about what we are doing. If we are on a secure system (like a bank or something) then we've probably already gone through a bunch of hoops (source check, research) and we mitigate it like anything else. curl https://whatever.io/installer.sh | sudo bash
We didn't check the md5s in the first example, so yolo, we don't care about the content of the tarball we just `make install`-ed. We're assuming the webserver isn't compromised and that https is protecting the transfer. Is it because the tarball hit the disk first? Does that give us a warm fuzzy? Is it because "anything could be in installer.sh!!!?! aaaaah!". Well, anything could be in Makefile too right? Anything could be in main.c or whatever.
Since quality of life tools and other soft things are hard to prove, I'll tell my anecdata story point. I sought out any package manager experience in python. I landed on Pipenv which uses pip. It failed to solve the tree. This led me to find poetry and the reason for existing which is exactly my experience. That was 2-3 years ago.
https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry#why
Combine this with asdf and it aligns with most other languages.
In legacy (don't break anything) mode, there's still no reason to not switch. I export `requirements.txt` with poetry just for pip legacy reasons and it works great. If I just update some scripts, I could avoid it. It's running all the time in CI, it's exercised quite a bit.
What's wrong with just using pip and requirements.txt? There's no dev section. In addition, bumping deps is not the same. I have a blog post explaining semver updates to a python dev:
https://squarism.com/2021/09/10/sciencing-out-updates/
my strong assertion: Python and Go missed it from the start. That's why it is so confusing. There's no other choice in Rust but Cargo. Rust devs are never confused on how to add a package, semver it. The answer is always Cargo. It's in the tutorial. It's in the book. It's in the culture.
I think I've heard that pip might support the pyproject spec, poetry already does. If you want scripts like npm, you can have that too with "taskipy". You don't have to.