Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/893133/
TechRepublic has published an
interview with Fedora project leader Matthew Miller.
Basically, every modern language provides a lot of building blocks
that usually come from other smaller open-source projects. These
are libraries, and they do things like format text, handle images,
connect to databases and deal with talking across the
internet. Projects like Fedora or Debian used to work to try to
package up every such library in our own format, made to work
nicely with everything else.Now, every new language — Rust, for example — comes with its own
tools to manage these, and they don’t work nicely together with our
old way. The sheer scale is overwhelming — for Rust alone, as I
checked just now there are 81,541 such libraries. We can’t keep up
with repackaging all of that into our own format, let alone that
plus all of the other languages. We need to approach this
differently in order to still provide a good solution to software
developers.I think a lot of that will need machine learning and automation …
we’ll need to keep adjusting so we can provide the value that Linux
distributions give users in trust, security and coherent
integration at an exponential scale.