> I disagree, so do others[0]

The comments agreeing with your opinion there have very few upvotes; mine have much more. Not that this has any bearing on the technical merits or demerits of the actual positions; the best solution is not necessarily the most popular one.

I do note that most of the users who complained about the package manager at the time it was merged have since changed their tune after we polished it off; and the users on the linked Reddit thread are probably just wondering why the package manager had to be added at all, since it was the main cause of the release being delayed.

> Apple did. Twice.

Okay. So why are you unsatisfied with macOS, and see the need to build your own system, then?

> In Haiku, this means presenting files to the user as though there are in one place when they're really in another

Huh?

So you are saying you do not like the feature of Windows Explorer that you can look inside .zips? Or the feature of most Linux desktops that you can mount ISOs or other disk image files and modify them without, you know, actually having them on physical partitions? Because the Haiku package manager is no different than either of these in terms of "showing the user something that 'isn't there'."

> with the results that trying to manipulate them leads to errors that require you to peel back the abstraction, the "magic", to understand.

The files are on a volume that is (mounted as) read-only. You will get equivalent errors from trying to modify read-only volumes on Linux, macOS, Windows, or any other OS. So what is really "magical" about this? There is no "abstraction" here, the files really are on a read-only volume.

> The most usual usecases for who? Haiku devs I imagine.

And users. There are only a dozen or two developers; there are hundreds (maybe thousands? nobody has done real counts) of users.

> But that doesn't change the fact that I don't agree with your choices.

Again, you are disagreeing from a theoretical standpoint here, not a practical one, of "I used this system and it is not viable for X, Y, Z reasons", only "this seems like magic to me and I don't like it."

> Because I'd be hard-pressed to think of something that has brought more complexity for less benefit than package managers.

Correction: Linux package managers. Haiku is one of the first major examples of a dependency-solving package manager that does not follow the Linux philosophy on a large number of points.

I really do believe that the major problems you cite about the Linux package managers are design flaws in the Linux philosophy, not package managers themselves, and that Haiku has sidestepped nearly all of them.

> Package managers, even Haiku's, don't allow this because they "optimize for the 99% usecase", or rather, the 99% of the developers' use cases.

This just shows you have not used (or at least read the documentation on) Haiku's package manager, because it does allow this, though the feature is not exposed to the GUI because it is, as noted before, very rarely used (if ever?). You can mount a package file from anywhere, to anywhere, with the `mount` command as with any other disk image. HaikuPorter uses this very functionality to create chroots, in fact.

> or rather, the 99% of the developers' use cases.

Once again you are implying that Haiku is somehow an elitist system that only the developers have any say in. This is just not true, and I don't know why you continue to imply it.

> I'm just an old curmudgeonly bastard anyway, you don't need to win me over.

If you want to be opposed to package managers "just because," then no, I don't. But if you are going to state your opposition to them on technical grounds that Haiku's package manager is not subject to, then yes, I am going to dispute your claims.