2 ms·

Yeah, I just noticed that and edited my comment. To me, that just makes the dependencies more coarse-grained -- now you have this artifical 2-level system of a

by chubot 11y ago

Yeah, I just noticed that and edited my comment. To me, that just makes the dependencies more coarse-grained -- now you have this artifical 2-level system of apps and runtimes. You've just recreated the same problem again with bigger blobs. So I can't see right now how it's going to work. I feel like it will flame out. But this kind of thing involves a lot of social problems in addition to technical problems, so you never know. EDIT: A more concrete example. Apache, nginx, Python, Ruby, Perl, node.js, Erlang web servers, etc. all depend on OpenSSL. OpenSSL is 500K lines of code. When an important update inevitably comes out for it, what happens? Are you now updating 10+ runtimes that are 1+ GB each? Do they use differential compression at all? I don't see how the two-level hierarchy really solves any problems. It could be the worst of both worlds (very fine-grained sharing vs. duplicating all dependencies)

SwellJoe 11y ago
"OpenSSL is 500K lines of code. When an important update inevitably comes out for it, what happens? Are you now updating 10+ runtimes that are 1+ GB each? Do they use differential compression at all?" Yes. The images are being updated via snapshot (transparent to the user). Just as RPMs can currently be updated with delta RPMs. The Poettering blog post about it that someone linked in another thread is really helpful: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu... It's not an amateur attempt at the problem. It may not be perfect (it probably is far from it for the next several years), but it does seem to have addressed the biggest issues in a reasonable way. We definitely need a way forward beyond the current generation of package managers; Nix has a really cool solution (and I would be happy with Nix getting more traction), and Guix does, too. Docker, on the other hand, which is the currently fashionable option for solving these problems, leaves a lot to be desired, and does fall prey to some of the concerns you raise.

by chubot 11y ago

SwellJoe 11y ago

"OpenSSL is 500K lines of code. When an important update inevitably comes out for it, what happens? Are you now updating 10+ runtimes that are 1+ GB each? Do they use differential compression at all?" Yes. The images are being updated via snapshot (transparent to the user). Just as RPMs can currently be updated with delta RPMs. The Poettering blog post about it that someone linked in another thread is really helpful: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu... It's not an amateur attempt at the problem. It may not be perfect (it probably is far from it for the next several years), but it does seem to have addressed the biggest issues in a reasonable way. We definitely need a way forward beyond the current generation of package managers; Nix has a really cool solution (and I would be happy with Nix getting more traction), and Guix does, too. Docker, on the other hand, which is the currently fashionable option for solving these problems, leaves a lot to be desired, and does fall prey to some of the concerns you raise.