Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>> I’d prefer not to add a feature like this.
>
> Why not?

Lots of reasons.

One reason is that pypi isn’t the only source of Python packages.  Nor
is CRAN the only source of R packages.  There are also package sources
that we fetch from other locations because of problems with whatever has
been published on the more popular repositories (e.g. most of the
rubygems).

I also think it’s not the job of a package manager to tell you how much
software there is in this world and how much of it can be accessed via
the package manager.  What good are those numbers?  What useful
information do they provide?  I don’t think it’s good to clutter the
list of commands (and the documentation) with features of very limited
usefulness.

I don’t like the ways it would work: neither do I want to store and
regularly update lists of remote packages nor do I want to have my
package manager call out to remote web servers.  What about packages
that are not available because they are not free software?

(Finally, I don’t like the use of the word “ecosystem” in the realm of
software.)

--
Ricardo