4 ms·

This includes the sources of all the Debian packages. In general this is a good idea, and it is close to how nixpkgs works (which is, in some sense, a "distrib

by tazjin 3y ago

This includes the sources of all the Debian packages. In general this is a good idea, and it is close to how nixpkgs works (which is, in some sense, a "distributed monorepo"), but git, the Debian tooling and so on wouldn't actually be able to support a good workflow here.

Zambyte 3y ago
> it is close to how nixpkgs works Not really...? Nix distributes package definitions that describe how to build and install the package. This is close to just about every other package manager, besides the fact that most don't have / use the description on how to build the package, and instead they just download a binary based on the package definition. The Nix equivalent to this joke would be storing all of the package code directly in the nixpkgs repo, instead of storing links to the source code. Debian would ba able to support the same flow as Nix just fine. You can just use source packages[0] [0] https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging/SourcePackage https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging/SourcePackage
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  I’d say it is close. A purer example would be gittup[1], which has its (very few) upstreams as submodules. But ultimately, Git submodules are just URLs and commit hashes stored in .gitmodules in the repository root, which doesn’t seem all that different from the URLs and hashes of contents passed to fetchgit et al. in Nixpkgs. The capability of being able to patch an arbitrary package locally and have every transitive dependency rebuilt automatically is also the same. On the other hand, Debian and Fedora maintain full collections of sources used in their releases, while, AFAIU, if you need an old version of something from Nixpkgs, it has fallen out of the official binary cache, and the upstream is gone, you’re on your own. (There have been some efforts to fix that[2], but the first attempt was very limited in scope, and there doesn’t seem to have been a second one.) [1] https://gittup.org/gittup/ https://gittup.org/gittup/ [2] https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-06-18-software-heritage/ https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-06-18-software-heritage/
  - tazjin 3y ago
    Things don't "fall out of" the binary cache. Garbage collecting it is an active research area.

by tazjin 3y ago

Zambyte 3y ago

> it is close to how nixpkgs works Not really...? Nix distributes package definitions that describe how to build and install the package. This is close to just about every other package manager, besides the fact that most don't have / use the description on how to build the package, and instead they just download a binary based on the package definition. The Nix equivalent to this joke would be storing all of the package code directly in the nixpkgs repo, instead of storing links to the source code. Debian would ba able to support the same flow as Nix just fine. You can just use source packages[0] [0] https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging/SourcePackage https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging/SourcePackage

mananaysiempre 3y ago
I’d say it is close. A purer example would be gittup[1], which has its (very few) upstreams as submodules. But ultimately, Git submodules are just URLs and commit hashes stored in .gitmodules in the repository root, which doesn’t seem all that different from the URLs and hashes of contents passed to fetchgit et al. in Nixpkgs. The capability of being able to patch an arbitrary package locally and have every transitive dependency rebuilt automatically is also the same. On the other hand, Debian and Fedora maintain full collections of sources used in their releases, while, AFAIU, if you need an old version of something from Nixpkgs, it has fallen out of the official binary cache, and the upstream is gone, you’re on your own. (There have been some efforts to fix that[2], but the first attempt was very limited in scope, and there doesn’t seem to have been a second one.) [1] https://gittup.org/gittup/ https://gittup.org/gittup/ [2] https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-06-18-software-heritage/ https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-06-18-software-heritage/
- tazjin 3y ago
  Things don't "fall out of" the binary cache. Garbage collecting it is an active research area.