Fair question! The two that I know of currently are Nix and Guix. Both target fewer platforms than Pkgsrc, so we know right out of the gate that they're not su

Fair question! The two that I know of currently are Nix and Guix. Both target fewer platforms than Pkgsrc, so we know right out of the gate that they're not suitable for all Pkgsrc use cases. The question of what they depend on needs fleshing out before it can be answered. Both Nix and Guix package software in a way that is, in general, hermetic. This means that they don't assume the installation of anything outside their domain— they don't require you to have anything installed on the base system to get going with them. They don't use your system's shell and they don't use your system's C library. As an exception on macOS, Nixpkgs allows some impurities for some macOS packages, e.g., they are allowed to call xcodebuild. But in general, they include their own toolchains in their entireties. So if what you're getting at is ‘where do they depend on the base system during operation’, the answer is, more or less ‘nowhere’. If the real thrust of your question is rather ‘what do you need to build them from source’, the answer, for now, in both cases is ‘a bunch of shit that they kindly prepackage for you in a binary tarball, if you want to bootstrap your own Nix or Guix on a given platform’. Guix has been doing a ton of work to reduce the size of their bootstrap seed, and it seems like within a few years they'll have it down to a hex monitor from which they can build a series of Scheme interpreters and C compilers until they have the whole system. If the main thing you're asking about is ‘what do they use internally to process their package sets’ or something like ‘what's the minimum installed size of these package managers’: for Nix/Nixpkgs you need the Nix language interpreter (written in C++), plus at least what's packaged in the ‘standard environment’ for Nixpkgs (GNU bash and coreutils, plus a libc and a C compiler which vary by platform); and for Guix you need Guile, an implementation (interpreter and runtime) of Scheme. I've never worried about their installed sizes, since they're much smaller than the total size of everything you might want to install with them. Idk the size of the full dependency closure for Guix and I don't have a great way to look it up at the moment. In the Nix case, the binary installation tarball is ~17 MB compressed and ~72 MB uncompressed, when you install it.[1] Happily, if Pkgsrc is easier to get started with due to its smaller footprint, it looks like in the future users will be able to use Pkgsrc to install Nix.[2] :) (For my part, I wouldn't mind if Nixpkgs included Pkgsrc, too. I wish it included Guix.) — 1: https://releases.nixos.org/?prefix=nix/nix-2.3.9/ https://releases.nixos.org/?prefix=nix/nix-2.3.9/ 2: https://pkgsrc.se/wip/nix https://pkgsrc.se/wip/nix