Open Stack

On 19 May 2016 at 22:40, Dmitry Tantsur <dtantsur at redhat.com> wrote:
>....
>> You are correct that my position is subjective, but it is based on my
>> experiences trying to operate and deploy OpenStack in addition to
>> writing code. The draw of Go, in my experience, has been easily
>> deploying a single binary I've been able to build and test consistently.
>> The target system has doesn't require Go installed at all and it works
>> on old distros. And it has been much faster.
>
>
> .. this is something distributions would never do or encourage. Ask zigo for
> reasons :)

Distros are having a hard time at the moment :) - much of their
/obvious/ value is no longer sought: for instance compile time is
cheap enough that folk are rebuilding distros just to check that the
binaries are actually from the same sources!

Further, the historical squashing of all dependencies into one version
becomes increasing fragile as dependency chains get larger: the
probability of a bug preventing a library being updated (best case -
caught by CI) or breaking something without warning (typical case,
little-to-no-CI of transitive reverse deps) goes up, not down. This is
one of the major reasons folks doing operations often bypass distro
packages (or roll their own isolated set with known-good
dependencies).

The idea of trusted-collections-of-packages made a lot more sense
before this explosion of software we have now, much of which is high
quality, and moving much much faster than distro release
cycles.Canonical/Ubuntu has at least partly got its head around this
with their focus for the last while on a vibrant app store ecosystem -
one where shipping a single binary with vendored, static dependencies
is actually viable.

So yeah, some distros are getting there, bit by bit :)

-Rob