from Hacker News

A crash course in package managers

by mprast on 3/23/25, 3:29 PM with 2 comments

  • by Hackbraten on 3/23/25, 3:49 PM

    Thanks for posting this.

    I think it’s important to clarify up front that there are two distinct classes of package managers. The article does that really well.

    Btw, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what would be good names for those. For example, the article calls them "user-centric package managers" (e.g. apt-get) vs. "developer-centric package managers" (e.g. pip.)

    For the same ontology, I’ve come up with "system(-level) package managers" vs. "platform package managers". With the former, I’m trying to emphasize that those affect the state of the entire host system. The latter usually has a development or platform environment as its boundary. Regardless, I kinda like the terms that the article proposes.