from Hacker News

PackagingCon – A conference only for software package management

by droelf on 8/8/23, 8:59 PM with 155 comments

• by 0x0203 on 8/9/23, 12:04 AM

  I'm not going to say where and I'm not asking for interested parties (we're not currently hiring anyway), but where I work (as a kernel/OS developer), package maintenance and management has been an ever-increasing burden to the point that we've tried hiring somebody specifically for the role. Unfortunately, it seems like this is a very specialized skill set that the vast majority of developers seem to find boring, uninteresting, and drudgerous, and finding someone qualified and interested has been exceedingly difficult. How would someone/a company go about finding people that are actually interested in this kind of work? There are clearly people who take on this task (some may even enjoy it!), and many who even do it for free for various open source projects, but I've no clue how to recruit or connect with any that would be willing to do this for a job. Any tips for finding or connecting with such folks would be much appreciated.

  Attending in person won't be possible, but I'll have to keep an eye on this conference and see if they provide a way to post/share such opportunities.

• by bnchrch on 8/8/23, 11:10 PM

  This might be the most mundane topic Ive found myself naturally extremely excited about.

  If your a developer working full time in only one or two languages you may never experience just how good/bad you have it.

  When you do, its really eye opening.

  Every time I transition to a new language professionally it can be like opening a bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans when you look into the packaging story.

  * Go binary release story is great but the gopath method for dependencies is annoying

  * Elixir has lockfiles and built-in package docs but the release story deviates too much

  * Javascript now that everything has settled into npm is a delight but the lack of stdlib, painful local aliasing and extremely heavy node_modules folder can be offputting

  * Python just sucks (lets hope poetry can bring the promised land of deterministic builds)

• by lifeisstillgood on 8/9/23, 12:28 AM

  After Feynman's death his blackboard had written upon it two things, one was "If I cannot recreate it I do not understand it".

  Software is so complex, dependencies so deep that we have to be experts in both minimising our dependancies and in recreating them from the ground up.

  In every team I join my first thing to hang on about is recreating the same builds time after time.

• by galaxyLogic on 8/9/23, 5:21 AM

  Package Manager is like a Librarian. Librarians don't write books, they organize them to make them easier for the reading public to find.

  Being a Librarian is a skillset that takes years of study. Library Science. https://www.bestmastersdegrees.com/best-masters-degrees-faq/....

• by ISV_Damocles on 8/8/23, 10:27 PM

  Would be fun of them to get a keynote speech from someone involved with EPS[1] (no, not that EPS[2]). I do wonder what parallels the two kinds of packaging have in common.

  [1]: https://eps.ieee.org/

  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript

• by mikenikles on 8/9/23, 4:14 AM

  I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

  Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

• by serial_dev on 8/8/23, 10:10 PM

  At first, I thought it's a joke conference site, but if I think about it, it's actually a great idea!

  Just goes to show how we are (or at least, I am) used to $PROG_LANG conferences, or Agile/SysAdmin/SRE/Mobile confs. Could be cool to have linting conf, code editor summit, etc.

• by hashtag-til on 8/8/23, 10:08 PM

  Surely the program will be packed.

• by predictabl3 on 8/8/23, 10:46 PM

  Should've scheduled it in September. Folks could've popped in after NixCon ;).

• by samsquire on 8/9/23, 11:04 AM

  I am a beginner in this space but I have some interest in trying to find solutions to the pain of package usage.

  * A new programming language and ecosystem could try to solve package management from day 0. ScrapScript is an example of this. I've heard good things about Go and Rust.

  * You can make package management fun by thinking of it as a data flow factory and like Factorio (which I've not played but I do get the feeling of that game) As it stands it's just lots of tedious boring busy work.

  * If only dependency usage was as enjoyable and straightforward as shopping and arranging bought things in a room.

  * I am investigating the modelling of packages as bundles of types foremost and state machines that can be traversed by the package manager to determine state interactions and compatibility automatically.

  * Changes to packages break everything. You could diff ASTs to see what's different.

  * I don't enjoy breaking changes. I have some old projects where I never pinned versions that cannot be built because I don't know what versions they work against.

• by qrush on 8/9/23, 12:56 AM

  I hope this will be recorded because this is my favorite kind of 1.25x content.

• by ary on 8/8/23, 11:58 PM

  They have a YouTube channel and I hope they publish all of the talks after the fact. Should anyone from the conference read this it would be great if paid corporate packages were offered that made the recorded sessions available for download.

  https://www.youtube.com/@packagingcon9302

• by regularfry on 8/9/23, 12:59 PM

  For me, the packaging mechanism itself is a less important step than the idea of distributions: can I set up a collection of packages that is known to be mutually compatible? Or is the approach "one repository to rule them all"? This is where I always (when I was poking at it, a while back) ran into trouble with Cabal and Stack. It was always possible (likely, in fact) that I would select some set of libraries that managed to be mutually incompatible, so I had to go version-chasing to get something that worked.

  This is something that Linux distros had to solve right from the start, so it's built into the concept, but I only very rarely see it done at all, let alone done well, in language package managers.

• by failuser on 8/9/23, 12:05 AM

  Will the announce a package manager to manage package managers? Every language having a package manager is getting out of hand. Having a unified way to install packages across RPM, DEB and Gentoo is also enticing. Maybe even Mac and Windows.

  That was mostly a joke.

• by swyx on 8/8/23, 10:07 PM

  oh i love ultra niche conferences like these. good luck and looking forward to it! looks like the CFP closed :/

• by alfalfasprout on 8/9/23, 2:44 AM

  Oh man, missed the deadline to submit a talk but we're working on some really cool packaging related to conda environments. Maybe for next year's conference.

  Excited to attend-- this is a topic that's becoming extremely important especially in the ML world where dealing with dependencies is a total nightmare and most of the solutions we've seen don't scale well to large orgs.

• by jmmv on 8/9/23, 12:36 PM

  I suppose there might be others, but I just wanted to mention http://pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/, a conference on the pkgsrc packaging system. This had been going on for years, but seems to have stopped in 2019 due to the pandemic and not resumed...

• by em-bee on 8/9/23, 12:58 AM

  there is still a lot of room to improve packaging.

  i really miss the conary packaging and build system. it was not perfect, but it essentially put packages into a revision control system so that for one version numbers of packages didn't matter any more. the whole set of packages for a release was locked into place so you could have a new release of the distribution with an older version of a package. and you could switch distribution versions like you can switch branches in git.

  at one point my system was so messed up that it wasn't really usable any more. even installing or removing packages didn't work. but i was able to run a command that would switch to the latest stable release version. conary then shuffled around downgrading several packages that i had installed to the right release version and getting me to a clean release state, so my system was workable again. neither rpm nor deb systems are capable of doing that, and i am not aware of any others either.

• by hamasho on 8/9/23, 12:14 AM

  I like a package management system integrated with project management, such as JS's package.json or Python's pyproject.toml. I want to manage project scripts, tool configs, and dependencies in one place. It's sometimes annoying, especially for larger projects, but overall, I hope more languages adopt that style.

• by binary132 on 8/9/23, 12:00 AM

  Unpopular opinion: old-style GOPATH semantics are significantly better than “package management”.

• by pipe_connector on 8/9/23, 12:54 AM

  https://packaging-con.org/about

  Lorem ipseum -- whoops!

• by benatkin on 8/8/23, 11:47 PM

  I hope they consider this: https://github.com/deislabs/bindle/blob/main/docs/invoice-sp...

  Bindle seems interesting but I'm not quite sure how to use it or whether it will take off anytime soon. Maybe cargo has some of its interesting features.

• by throwawaaarrgh on 8/8/23, 11:57 PM

  I can't wait for ShoelacesCon. Last year I couldn't make it; I was all tied up.

• by BigElephant on 8/9/23, 1:39 AM

  naive question - doesn't docker 'solve' this?

• by sam0x17 on 8/9/23, 2:59 AM

  "Our PoW-based solution defends fierily"

  oof