8 ms·

This (packaging/installation/management) seems to be a solved problem for those who've used Nix. Does it need solving again in a Lennart-specific way?

• digi_owl 10y ago
  Poettering have a bad habit of not looking before coding (or blogging). That said, i think that blog predates Nix, but it sure as hell do not predate Gobolinux. And Gobolinux does its thing using mostly shell script (with the odd Python or binary for performance reasons).
  • chriswarbo 10y ago
    > i think that blog predates Nix, but it sure as hell do not predate Gobolinux The blog post is dated September 2014. Nix had been around for at least a decade by then (e.g. see https://nixos.org/docs/papers.html https://nixos.org/docs/papers.html ). Wikipedia says Gobolinux is about the same age as Nix.
• chriswarbo 10y ago
  I primarily think of Nix as being a build tool akin to Make rather than a package manager. It's almost as if the flakiness of Make made us think that building applications or libraries was somehow a different thing to building an OS, so we invented a separate thing called a package manager. Then Nix came along and showed that a single build tool can be used for something as simple as a preprocessor (Nix's string quasiquotation is very nice), through to compiling applications, bundling applications into a coherent OS, and even orchestrating clusters of real & virtual machines. I wonder if this proposed system would be as amenable to handling such a wide variety of software (e.g. https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#chap-language-support https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#chap-language-support ) on such a wide variety of platforms (e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/os-specific https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/os-specifi... ).