I used to be on the side of relying on native tools/libs, and managing them in a similar way to what you to describe, but it all became too much to handle, with dependencies across projects breaking with regularity.
Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but switching to Docker to sequester my projects and their dependencies has saved me so much time and hassle, especially with the amount of repos I work on throughout the year.
My biggest weakness today is that I still don't reach for Docker right away when starting work on a new project or when evaluating a new tool. Old habits…
My point was that you can do this without docker. On Linux you can use separate chroots for each project, on OSX you could probably do that too but since prebuilt tools for generating a darwin rootfs are rarer prefixes are easier.
I knows it’s becoming a bit of a meme now that modern software development is just rediscovering approaches from the 70s…
but it has really hit me recently how so many “indispensable” projects are just something that’s existed for decades re-written at a higher abstraction-level with a nicer UX.
I wish I had more classic Unix sysadmin experience. But unfortunately the gains are real, and I can’t justify investing time into learning the older tech (let’s say, using chroot instead of docker), when the newer is so much faster to learn, and has (comparative to modern hardware) such small overhead (if you’re not on MacOS :P)
I am excited about the rust-rewrite movement for shell though - precisely because it’s a chance to bring all the ux lessons we’ve learned in the last decades to cli-tools.
Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but switching to Docker to sequester my projects and their dependencies has saved me so much time and hassle, especially with the amount of repos I work on throughout the year.
My biggest weakness today is that I still don't reach for Docker right away when starting work on a new project or when evaluating a new tool. Old habits…