The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

You could also have guessed it when you noticed it was a kid student showing up (and off) with a lengthy critic on the historical evolution of UNIX tools and others OSes and tools that he discovered a couple of years ago, while you possibly were using them and watching them evolve while he was still in his father's bollocks (and some of us (not me) were working on UNIXes while his father was a kid). You know what to expect in this case, especially if you remember having produced the same kind of over-confident and yet uninformed rant in your days :-) (I do :-D )

Compare to Linux, where a piece of software is scattered around /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share, /usr/doc. (Or /usr/local/*, you never know which) Oh, and those fun times where something depends on a libxxx.so.N but all that's on the system is libxxx.so.N.M.O and libxxx.so.N.M for some reason, so you have to make the symlink yourself. Or the distribution has a minimum of version N+1, so your option is to find the source for the library, figure out all the -devel packages it needs, and compile it up (hopefully), or just symlink libxxx.so.N to libxxx.so.N+1 and hope it works. And then the fun of figuring out what the package is named. pdf2text lives in poppler, who would have thought. Need gcc? That will be build-essential on Ubuntu last time I needed it. (Not build-essentials, either)

Natural selection ought to quickly do away with an organ that served no purpose but to occasionally kill one of the luckless organisms that possessed it.

It should have been obvious that it was doing something else, or more specifically, that the gene(s) for "having an appendix" were.

I've blogged about some of my problems with Homebrew. Generally speaking, Homebrew is a triumph of marketing and beautiful web design over technical merits (there are better options for macOS, but none nearly as popular as brew).

The blog post: http://inthebox.webmin.com/homebrew-package-installation-for...

I get that it's easy and lots of people like it, so I mostly try to hold my tongue, but every once in a while I'll see someone suggest something crazy like using Homebrew on Linux (where there is an embarrassment of good and even great package management options) and it makes me shudder. I'm not saying don't use Homebrew on your macOS system if it makes your life easier. I just would never consider it for a production system of any sort. I'm even kinda mistrustful of it on developer workstations (though there are plenty of similarly scary practices in the node/npm, rubygems, etc. worlds, so that ship has kinda sailed and I am resolved to just watch it all unfold).

"What happened to wanting simple tools that do one thing and one thing right?"

I still want that. Doing one thing right in this case means doing more than what packages on macOS or Windows do. One can argue about the complexity of rpm+yum or dpkg+apt, and it's likely that one could come up with simpler and more reliable implementations today, but if you want them to be more focused, I have to ask which feature(s) you'd remove? Dependency resolution? That one's a really complicated feature; a lot of code, and it's been reimplemented multiple times for rpm (up2date, yum, and now dnf). Surely, we can just leave that out. Or, perhaps the notion of a software repository? Is it really necessary for the package manager to download the software for us? I mean, I have a web browser and wget or curl. Verification of packages and the files they install, do we really need it? Can't we just assume that our request to the website won't be tampered with, and that what we're downloading has been vouched for by a party we trust? I dunno...I'm not really seeing a thing we can get rid of without making Linux as dumb as macOS or Windows.

"Don't we want package managers to only manage packages, to decouple them as much as possible from the rest of the operating system, and leave system configuration management to other tools?"

This is the strangest question, to me. Why on earth would we want the OS outside of the package manager? Why would we want to only verify packages that aren't part of the core OS? This is why Linux is so vastly superior to Windows and macOS on this one front. I'm having a hard time thinking of why having the package manager completely ignorant of the core OS would be a good thing. What benefit do you believe that would provide?

And, NixOS does not meet the description you've given. The OS is built with nix the package manager. Running nix as a standalone package manager on macOS does have the failing you've mentioned, but that's not the fault of nix. And, yes, nix is a better option for macOS than brew, but the package selection is much smaller and not as up to date in the general case...so maybe worse is better, in that case.

I get a bit ranty about package management. I spend a lot of time working with them (as a packager, software builder, distributor, etc.) and have strong opinions. But, I believe those strong opinions are backed by at least better than average experience.

And, there are some new package managers that isolate in this way (and go well beyond it by containerizing). Flatpak is probably the most promising, IMHO. And, it still provides all the benefits of a good package manager, like verification, authenticity, downloading automatically from a repo, dependency resolution for core libraries. And, the way Flatpak handles the latter feature is really quite cool (and avoids having to distribute dozens of copies of the same libs).

Your description of installing packages on Linux does not match my experience in the past decade. Dependency resolution is a solved problem on Linux, at least on the major distros with good package managers.