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How can a novel emerging challenger software (written in Rust) take me 4 hours to install (still ongoing)?

Today I have decided to give Pijul a go. Pijul describes itself as a theory-sound alternative to Git, which I have wanted to get away from for a while now, due to various reasons -- many of which I saw Pijul advertise to have solved on design level.

So I set away a day to learn Pijul, today. Well, 4 hours after I sat down -- after a number of hilariously wonky failures of "Rust ecosystem" to do the right thing as I had to install Rust with some shell one-liners those insane wizards recommend for installation process (all in the name of "stability but not stagnation") -- Pijul has now been installing with the blasted `cargo` for an hour now (that's after 3 hours of getting to the point where `cargo install pijul` stopped exploding in my face) -- telling me I only have 40 crates more to install. Are they throttling me, perhaps? I don't care -- I should have been installing Pijul from a repository in accordance with my Linux distribution, or -- at worst -- download a BLOODY COMPILED PROGRAM IMAGE.

What is it with the hipster developers today? Everything they get of tools, they subsume and churn out intricate complexities the likes of which we hadn't seen yesterday. Tell me fellow developers who think installation of your software has to require three and a half novel "installation solutions" to which I can't be arsed to be made privy -- do you think your life today is easier than, I don't know -- wrangling with a Makefile and a C compiler (which today thankfully can do rather good job of standards compliance)?

I mean I wouldn't mind Pijul being written in Rust -- but it turns out Rust's advertised elegancy in practice is wrapped in so much "giftwrap" I feel like what desire I had to learn Rust myself, I'll stear well clear.

Here's an advice for developers in general -- an advice continiously ignored for decades -- stop blowing your original scope of delivery in auxilary packages you think you need to reinvent just because you can or because your mom is out of town! For programming languages like Rust this most certainly entails NOT writing your own package manager, with its own package delivery mechanism that has its own configuration file format and virtual machine to configure dependency resolution or what have you!

You wanted to write a programming language that has novel features you think we need? Fine -- write one and stop there. Watch it grow, and watch people who are busy working on other parts (scopes) of software to integrate your offer.

What a shitshow. Stop smuggling alternative package managers, installers, and discombulators with your actual product -- I only want the latter, I don't want the rest of your damn piping, walls, roof and a cathedral on top of it!

Don't be that guy starting with a pin, and ending up with a fucking diorama miniature of a pig farm in Netherlands. Jesus.

Comments
  • 2
    "Installing" via cargo is really just compiling it and putting the binary into a folder in PATH

    As for compiling Rust: Installing the rust compiler should be dead simple and cargo literally does everything for you when doing "cargo install pijul"

    In fact I just installed pijul while writing this comment. Literally took 1 minute and 34 seconds to compile, so idk 🤷‍♂️
  • 3
    You're a pijul
  • 4
    the most hilarious part of this rant is, that you complain how developers always find new ways to build software, but at the same time _you_ want to get away from git..

    double standards are funny.
  • 1
    What's wrong with git?
  • 1
    Yes. The interssting question is: What where your problems with git and did pijul solve them?
  • 1
    @horus I agree, and jumping on a new unproven software written in a still pretty new language sounds like jumping of abridge hopping there will be a sea of milk and honey breaking the fall.

    Sure, sometimes disruptive new tools come but they are rare. Git was one such tool that more or less replaced every other versioning tool in existence.

    Thinking you can do better require some serious hubris that I do admire but I would not count on.

    And it sounded more like you had problem with rust than the actual software.

    And in this case, fora very mew software, having a less than trivial installation sounds actually normal, the minds that can find out ways to really up one a branch standard are often very focused on the problem.

    Installation programs are not the problem :P
  • 1
    @thebiochemic Also by the sounds of it he tried his best to avoid the simplest way of installing rust via rustup...
  • 2
    I don't know, pijul sounds to me like a swear word in some Slavic language or something.
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