[conspire] People failing to learn about package gatekeeping, part 1

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

> On Apr 17, 2022, at 18:02, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> If, say, you had been a very bad person and wanted to punish yourself,
> you might decide to be a PHP developer. ;-> And, in the process of
> improving your projects, you might be strongly drawn to the cutting
> edge, and so might reasonably become impatient with, say, the PHP 7.3
> tools and libraries provided by Debian 10 "Buster" (current debian-stable). 
> 
> That's why the Web is choc-a-bloc with third-party instructions about
> how to circumvent your distro package regime partially or wholly, to get
> versions beyond what the distro provides. This example for Debian 10
> is among the least reckless, only adding a third-party "PPA" repo to
> sources.list:
> https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-latest-php-on-debian/ <https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-latest-php-on-debian/>

I’m reminded of one job interview in my recent cycle where the work was largely API work (which didn’t sound particularly compelling to me before this, but definitely didn’t after): she (my interviewer) said that one of the frustrations of working in that group is that people would take 2-3 *years* to adopt even the biggest quality-of-life improvements, largely because of package interdependency requirements (especially with things like Node and PHP).

So instead took a position contracting for some “small” company and shipped a small app update the first week. Far more satisfying.

Deirdre
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