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Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting
(www.phoronix.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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There are other costs, too. Someone has to spend a LOT of time maintaining their repos: testing and reviewing each package, responding to bugs caused by each packaging format's choice of dependencies, and doing this for multiple branches of supported distro version! Thats a lot of man hours that could still be used for app distribution, but combined could help make even more robust and secure applications than before.
And, if we're honest, except for a few outliers like Nix, Gentoo, and a few others, there's little functional difference to each package format, which simply came to exist to fill the same need before Linux was big enough to establish a "standard".
Aaaanyway
I do think we could have package formats leveraging torrenting more though. It could make updates a bit harder to distribute quickly in theory but nothing fundamentally out of the realm of possibilities. Many distros even use torrents as their primary form of ISO distribution.
I was thinking mostly of iso images I guess. You are talking about package updates.
First, fair point.
That said, for package updates, are there not Alpine mirrors? You do not need much bandwidth to feed out to the mirrors.
But I agree that, ultimately, they are going to have to find a home for the package repos if they want to directly feed their install base.
As for “the other costs”, those do not seem to have anything to do with their hosting going away.