A sample journey when trying to install software:

  • Try your distros repos, it’s either not there or an older version
  • Oh wait, you need to add their repo to your list and try again
  • Actually, they don’t have a repo, but you can install this deb/rpm from their site
  • Nevermind, it actually needs to be installed with pip to get the latest version
  • Or wait, it was actually a rust package and needs cargo
  • Well, this package is available as a snap
  • Screw it, I’ll just build it from source…. Except the dependencies I need take me through the entire journey again

It’s crazy with a large package like mesa. It uses meson, which requires it be installed via pip, and also needs rust which is best installed via a snap, but then there are dependencies it needs that require multiple paths…

On Windows: find the msi or exe and be done with it.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    15 hours ago

    pip and cargo are not intended as (system) package managers. Your target package may of course have dependencies on them, but from the way you described it it sounds like that’s what you attempted?

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        15 hours ago

        This, I assume? https://github.com/frida/frida That is indeed a bit eyebrow-raising. Though they do offer pre-built binaries.

        Also for stuff like this, I can highly recommend the Nix package manager, even if you are not on NixOS. There it would, for example, just be nix run nixpkgs#frida-tools, from any distro.

        But I know you’re not OP. Would actually be interesting what exactly they tried to install.