I mean, running `apt install` is basically a requirement to build lots of software these days. And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. It's one application for the version control system, and that's only going to be used by developers, and not end users. They'll always just use `crates.io`.
Besides, Pijul is going to always be using "not Git" I'm afraid - after all, it is a version control system, and they're going to dogfood it. So, given that - I doubt this complaint will ever be seen with much weight. I mean, why would it be? Their concern is creating Pijul, not necessarily getting dozens of contributors or doing the GitHub thing or capitulating to Git users or whatnot.
I do consider the lack of online source browsing and online docs a significantly larger and more immediate barrier - but I already mentioned that.
> And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation.
On source-based compilation systems like Homebrew (OS X), darcs depends on ghc, and ghc is huge (in both disk space used and compilation time). I suppose you could make a comparison to rustc - also huge, and a dependency in such a system for anything written in Rust; anyone interested in using this library is writing code in Rust, so wouldn't it be a little hypocritical to have a problem with big dependencies?
Well, maybe. Personally I think Rust would significantly benefit from a way to compile to portable C code, for precisely this reason. (I know that this is harder than it sounds.)
It's true that end users can just obtain the library from crates.io, though, for purposes other than browsing (which is possible with Cargo but not convenient).
Besides, Pijul is going to always be using "not Git" I'm afraid - after all, it is a version control system, and they're going to dogfood it. So, given that - I doubt this complaint will ever be seen with much weight. I mean, why would it be? Their concern is creating Pijul, not necessarily getting dozens of contributors or doing the GitHub thing or capitulating to Git users or whatnot.
I do consider the lack of online source browsing and online docs a significantly larger and more immediate barrier - but I already mentioned that.