Increasingly, programming languages come with their own built-in package managers. In early scripting langugages like Perl and Python, these systems were ad-hoc and mainly focused on making it easy for developers to find modules to use on sites like CPAN and PyPI. More recent languages come with complete toolchains for managing the development and distribution of both libraries and applications.

At the same time, Linux distributions have been centered around package management for a long time. Most if not all distributions have their own package management system, designed to make it possible for the distribution developers to package, maintain and curate libraries and applications, delivering software updates and security patches and ensuring that the overall system is consistent and works well.

This talk focuses on the intersection of these two package management philosophies. I have been involved in the process of making software written in the rust programming language available through the openSUSE package management system, and will describe the challenges we have faced and the challenges that still remain for Linux distributions as developers get more and more used to working with language-specific package management systems.