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If you are against traditional package management, what is the argument for this approach over something like NixOS? This doesn't seem to do anything for tryin
by ahnick 6y ago
If you are against traditional package management, what is the argument for this approach over something like NixOS? This doesn't seem to do anything for trying to roll back to a previous known working state, which is probably my biggest issue with the way most mainstream linux distributions package management works today.
- hisham_hm 6y agoThey are contemporaries: GoboLinux is as old as Nix, and older than NixOS. There were other similar ideas around (GNU Stow), but I think Gobo was the first that went "let's make a full OS out of this". I would say Gobo and NixOS follow roughly the same philosophy, with Nix adding the functional aspect on top, which is pretty neat. But yes, one of the motivations for Gobo was to make it easy to revert versions of programs, with commands for enabling/disabling their symlinks, and even keeping multiple versions at the same time. We didn't do full-system snapshots, but handled it on a program-by-program basis, which was our main interest at the time (tinkering with the latest window manager!).
- Ericson2314 6y agohttps://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/17 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/17 proposes lots and lots of symlinks in a way that reminds me of GoboLinux :).
- Mathnerd314 6y agoFor handling rollbacks you can use a normal layout and an A/B partition scheme (https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab) or apt-btrfs-snapshot. The problem with NixOS's approach is you have to rebuild the world on every small change, because the folder hash changes. GoboLinux's layout at least avoids the cascading rebuilds.