But ... I knew that. I just didn't understand the importance of what I knew.

Still more Randall Monroe greatness.

What with one thing and another I learned about the TEA project recently. Ambitious stuff, and I'm completely unprepared to talk about the project as a whole, but being a ex-academic, I wasted no time downloading the white-paper, and brought along a dead-trees version for flight as we took our spawn off to visit one set of Grandparents.¹ The paper concerns itself with a distributed crytographic ledger to be used for archiving and authenticating the open-source ecosystem but also to provide a framework for distributing donations across that ecosystem.

The point is that much of the open-source ecosystem is un-sexy tooling and infrastructure that only excites the people who use it to write other open-source software, but donation come from either users (who tend to direct them to sexy top-of-the-stack end-user stuff) and companies (who direct them to things they are specifically trying to improve). Very little money flows to underlying stuff that "just works" even if it requires on-going maintenance to preserve that state of operability. There is a reason Randall uses the word "thanklessly" in the comic. Anyway, the paper observes that to perform such a distribution you would need to know how much each project contributes to the ecosystem, and then that a package manager (such as apt, pip, npm, or homebrew) is exactly an encoded version of that knowledge.

I'm pretty sure my jaw hung slack for the several seconds it took for my mind to re-orient on my freshly remade understanding of the open-source ecosystem. Of course, the package managers already know that stuff. At least collectively.² And maybe missing the dependency links implicit in rarely used build options. But for the most part it's there.

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¹ Between the pandemic and our commitments taking care of honorary Grandma we'd been able to avoid this for some time. Now we will, no doubt, have to do the other Grandparents soon as well.

² It is worth noticing that there are multiple classes of package managers and build dependency systems out there, handling independent (well, largely independent) and distinct (again, largely) ecosystems. To perform as envisioned the proposed tea protocol will need to be flexible enough to express relationships within and between all such groupings. Not easy stuff.