Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out

Posted by birdculture 12/26/2025

Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out(nesbitt.io)

784 points | 465 commentspage 6

rudolph9 12/27/2025|

It’s worth considering if these package managers would have taken off if they didn’t use git. You get a bunch for free, why not use it while you’re small?

whytevuhuni 12/27/2025||

No mention of Guix. Has its situation improved? I remember waiting almost an hour on “guix pull” to catch up with its git repo on a fresh install.

cben 1/5/2026||

Obligatory link to the gold intro to So. Many. Aspects. of pkg manager design: https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m... Even if its section on "Central Package Registry" isn't very deep.

gethly 12/26/2025||

If we stopped using VCS to fetch source files, we would lose the ability to get the exact commit(understand as version that has nothing to do with the underlying VCS) of these files. Git, Mercurial, SVN.., github, bitbucket...it does not matter. Absolutely nobody will be building downloadable versions of their source files, hosted on who knows how "prestigious" domains, by copying them to another location just to serve the --->exact same content<--- that github and alike already provide.

This entire blog is just a waste of time for anyone reading it.

throwway120385 12/26/2025||

Or you could just ship a tarball and an sha checksum.

gethly 12/26/2025||

you could, in case you want to make only certain releases publicly available. but then, who wants to do that manual labour? we're talking mainstream here, not specific use cases.

forrestthewoods 12/26/2025|||

> This entire blog is just a waste of time for anyone reading it.

Well that’s an extremely rude thing to say.

Personally I thought it was really interesting to read about a bunch of different projects all running into the same wall with Git.

I also didn’t realize that Git had issues with sparse checkouts. Or maybe author meant shallow? I forget.

layer8 12/26/2025||

And yet, that's pretty much how the Java world works (Maven repositories).

dwardu 12/26/2025||

Worst thing is when you’re in a an office and your pc along with other pcs pulls from git unauthenticated, then you get hit with api limits

didip 12/26/2025||

So… What we need is a globally distributed git seeders of all open source github content, then?

Seems possible if every git client is also a torrent client.

encom 12/26/2025||

>[Homebrew] Auto-updates now run every 24 hours instead of every 5 minutes[...]

That is such an insane default, I'm at a loss for words.

croemer 12/26/2025||

You mean the 5 minutes is insane, right?

justsomehnguy 12/26/2025||

Every time I things like I really want to punch people over TCP/IP. UDP wouldn't suffice.

mcny 12/26/2025||

I want to take a quick detour here if anyone is knowledgeable about this topic.

> The hosting problems are symptoms. The underlying issue is that git inherits filesystem limitations, and filesystems make terrible databases.

Does this mean mbox is inherently superior to maildir? I really like the idea of maildir because there is nothing to compact but if we assume we never delete emails (on the local machine anyways), does that mean mbox or similar is preferable over maildir?

juped 12/26/2025|

No, of course not.

nottorp 12/27/2025||

> Auto-updates now run every 24 hours instead of every 5 minutes

What the... why would you run an autoupdate every 5 minutes?

wg0 12/26/2025|

Why not use SQLite then as database for package managers? A local copy could be replicated easily with delta fetch.

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