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there is still a lot of room to improve packaging. i really miss the conary packaging and build system. it was not perfect, but it essentially put packages int
by em-bee 3y ago
there is still a lot of room to improve packaging.
i really miss the conary packaging and build system. it was not perfect, but it essentially put packages into a revision control system so that for one version numbers of packages didn't matter any more. the whole set of packages for a release was locked into place so you could have a new release of the distribution with an older version of a package. and you could switch distribution versions like you can switch branches in git.
at one point my system was so messed up that it wasn't really usable any more. even installing or removing packages didn't work. but i was able to run a command that would switch to the latest stable release version. conary then shuffled around downgrading several packages that i had installed to the right release version and getting me to a clean release state, so my system was workable again. neither rpm nor deb systems are capable of doing that, and i am not aware of any others either.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoNixOS and Guix are capable of that; Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite (the same technology, just with different default desktop environments) also similar conceptually, but are a little less flexible to manage than through their management CLIs than those of Nix and Guix. I think all of them would recover to a consistent and fully-functional state, but Silverblue/Kinoite would not necessarily remove the 'ghost' packages automatically.
- Cloudef 3y agoNix is capable of that and I consider it golden standard right now, it also allows you do multiple things not related to "package management", such as configuration management, creating vms / docker images, cross-compiling, reproducible dev envs, deploying to AWS etc...