Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:48:56 GMT

c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:48:56 GMT

@mhoye https://github.com/bracketttc/autotools-skeumorph

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:20:25 GMT

gnomon@mastodon.social — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:20:25 GMT

@mhoye I agree.

But I think this truism forces many people to confront the thought that (system!) package management is important, even necessary to form this understanding and chart a course through the dependency graph; and I think that a large fraction of people confronted in this way reject the idea so hard that they then go on to do foolish, silly, damaging things rather than adjust their beliefs.

System package manager maintainers, AND HUMILITY, are bedrock software infrastructure.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:54:30 GMT

supermoosie@mastodon.au — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:54:30 GMT

@gvwilson @mhoye

Which us entirely different to fraggle13

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:47:01 GMT

womble@infosec.exchange — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:47:01 GMT

@mhoye @hyc @owen it's the rare Oceanic Polycule.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:34:47 GMT

maddiem4@raphus.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:34:47 GMT

@coder @mhoye @elebertus I hear you about Nixpkgs. What's kind of a funny coincidence is that I literally started writing a package manager to be a similar tool to Nix but with a lot more engineering and UX emphasis (#Layover), because I found Nix's pros compelling but the cons agonizing. Unfortunately I detoured into making a new programming language to implement it in (#pronelang), and then got sick in a way that slowed down progress significantly. C'est la vie, I guess ‍️

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:26:19 GMT

coder@alex.femto.pub — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:26:19 GMT

@elebertus @mhoye @coder @MaddieM4 I wrote about the topic here:

https://alex.corcoles.net/notes/tech/containers-might-not-be-the-right-answer

It really depends. In any case, I agree that software should be designed to be easy to run. In some cases, containers can be the right answer.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:23:51 GMT

f4grx@chaos.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:23:51 GMT

@gemelen @MaddieM4 @elebertus @mhoye hahahahahaha lol

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:10:22 GMT

f4grx@chaos.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:10:22 GMT

@mhoye except when the baroque nonsense sudo curl half a gigabyte of build system tools

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:07:22 GMT

stompyrobot@mastodon.gamedev.place — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:07:22 GMT

@mhoye
For most projects: You type "npm install" and then you type "npm build"
Works fine, as long as the supply chain isn't currently attacked

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:55:06 GMT

jamesb192@fosstodon.org — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:55:06 GMT

@mhoye: Antifeature, if you build or install without passing all of your config arguments to build, Scrap will reconfigure first with the args you didn't explicitly include, redefaulted. Yay, #gpsd let me stick a spork in my eye.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:44:25 GMT

mhoye@cosocial.ca — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:44:25 GMT

@coder @MaddieM4 @elebertus The thing is, if you know your dependencies you can get from there to whatever containerization you want pretty easily. But the reverse is very, very not true.

I mean, Docker was born because somebody told an ops person "well it works on my machine" and the ops person said "well we'll ship your machine then" and from the stories I've heard it took _years_ to stabilize and secure AWS after starting with that as a foundation.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:42:24 GMT

coder@alex.femto.pub — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:42:24 GMT

@coder @MaddieM4 @mhoye @elebertus for internal projects, my preferred way is to hope that I only have to support a limited number of environments, and make sure there's up-to-date instructions for all of them. I'm likely lucky, but in the projects I've worked on, this has not been so difficult!

My big issue is with having to support macOS or Windows, because frequently, work will not provide me environments.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:39:35 GMT

coder@alex.femto.pub — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:39:35 GMT

@MaddieM4 @elebertus @mhoye I don't know, the problem is that containers bring their own problems to the table.

Yes, in a way it simplifies things because suddenly everyone is on a "single environment". But I find Docker very problematic. Podman is nice, but then some people want to use Docker anyway.

Unfortunately, any answer has its problems. At work we currently use nixpkgs for dependencies, but that also brings its own problems.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:24:22 GMT

gemelen@mammut.moe — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:24:22 GMT

@MaddieM4 @elebertus
Aren't those containers themselves supported on one and a half platforms (Linux and FreeBSD (and secretly SmartOS))?
@mhoye

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:15:19 GMT

mhoye@cosocial.ca — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:15:19 GMT

@irvingreid amazing.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:04:27 GMT

irvingreid@hachyderm.io — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:04:27 GMT

@mhoye literally three posts later in my timeline https://infosec.exchange/@i0null/117053648196360311

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:53:17 GMT

datarama@hachyderm.io — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:53:17 GMT

@silvermoon82 I am sure that there are places on the internet where people are shipping shipping ship shipping ships shipping shipping ships and ship shipping ships shipping shipping ships.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:59 GMT

silvermoon82@wandering.shop — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:59 GMT

@datarama
One could go so far as to call it a shipping ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships.

Not me, of course, but someone could.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:42 GMT

gvwilson@mastodon.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:42 GMT

@mhoye ah, I see the problem - you want fragg13 not fraggle. I realize it's marked as an unmaintained fork, but that's just marketing.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:20 GMT

maddiem4@raphus.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:49:20 GMT

@elebertus @mhoye This is very much why I made that thread the other day like "you can hate containers, but please understand the bleeding wound they gauze over for the median UNIX-derivative toucher" (not quite in those words, but yeah). Containers really help *formalize* your dependencies, assumptions, and processes - if you're hanging onto the Dockerfile or comparable recipe - while also allowing most of your audience to live their whole natural lives without caring. If you do have to care sometime, the recipe is your audit trail for studying what the heck is going on.

Containers still have their flaws (and are absolutely offensive to me as a solution for perceived issues in the desktop app space), but they do solve some problems that are currently hard to find better alternative solutions to.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:21:46 GMT

mhoye@cosocial.ca — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:21:46 GMT

@npdoty it’s also a growth path for a community-oriented project. “If the install process doesn’t work for you, we consider that a bug and would like to hear from you” is makes getting involved very accessible to new participants.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:17:27 GMT

datarama@hachyderm.io — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:17:27 GMT

@mhoye @hyc @owen looks like a ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships?

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:10:48 GMT

npdoty@techpolicy.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:10:48 GMT

@mhoye in a way, I think that clear expectation can also relieve some pressure on the developer. Installing software is not either "download a binary and it definitely works perfectly" or "follow our documentation and work out the intricacies based on chatroom conversations", it's a clear install process. And yes it might have bugs. The rest of your software also has bugs! You aren't some unique failure of a developer, you just have probably a high priority bug for your list.

Reply to Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense. on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:09:50 GMT

jplebreton@mastodon.social — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:09:50 GMT

@mhoye any time a build process becomes yak shaving it's because one or more steps in it was taken for granted as being trivially reproducible (either by the person who created the process or one of its stack constituent processes)