Package Managers

If I look at my environment.zsh (just the part of my zsh config that handles PATH - I see the following customizations, although not all are active on every machine at every time (the curse of shared dotfiles):

• add rustup's bin/ and source .cargo/env
• add /usr/local/go/bin
• add JDK via SDKMAN (partial dogfooding for [leiningen-sdkman][]
• Homebrew
• nvm for node.js

And then stuff I don't currently use:

• add node_modules/bin from nixpkgs
• add Elixir via kiex and Erlang via kerl

I kinda hate this - and I get that I could maybe, sometimes just grab a version that's packaged via the distro's package manager - but I usually need a specific version (sometimes newer, sometimes LTS) when I am writing code in that particular language.

Of course it would be easy to wish for a generalized package manager, and SDKMAN is just that - but they also don't seem to have everything I need.

And so the path mangling continues. Usually it's not even that bad, except Homebrew, which insists on adding itself to the front of the path, when every other script appends or prepends at exactly that moment in time when you call it, so it's relatively easy to get the order how you want it.

But it's still ridiculous I can't have one bin folder for all of those. Maybe cluttering up /usr/local/bin wasn't so bad after all, I'd probably have had less issues if all those tools and package managers would have symlinked their binaries (even better if configurable) to ~/.local/bin or something like that and then you'd simply include that in your path and be done with it. How likely are naming conflicts with 10 language package managers anyway?