Comment by drowsspa
4 months ago
NodeJS, Ruby, etc also have this problem, as does Go with CGO. So the problem is the binary dependencies with C/C++ code and make, configure, autotools, etc... The whole C/C++ compilation story is such a mess that almost 5 decades ago inventing containers was pretty much the only sane way of tackling it.
Java at least uses binary dependencies very rarely, and they usually have the decency of bundling the compiled dependencies... But it seems Java and Go just saw the writing on the wall and mostly just reimplement everything. I did have problems with the Snappy compression in the Kafka libraries, though, for instance .
The issue is with cross platform package management without proper hooks for the platform themselves. That may be ok if the library is pure, but as soon as you have bindings to another ecosystem (C/C++ in most cases), then it should be user/configurable instead of the provider doing the configuration with post installs scripts and other hacky stuff.
If you look at most projects in the C world, they only provide the list of dependencies and some build config Makefile/Meson/Cmake/... But the latter is more of a sample and if your platform is not common or differs from the developer, you have the option to modify it (which is what most distros and port systems do).
But good luck doing that with the sprawling tree of modern packages managers. Where there's multiple copies of the same libraries inside the same project just because.