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What problem does it solve?

• dscrd 14y ago
  Same problem as every other GNU software.
• eyko 14y ago
  Does it need to? It's for hackers, not for every user. If you're bored and feel like hacking on something, this might interest you. If it doesn't, Mr. Ludovic is not trying to force you to use it. For me, some of its features, specially non-privileged user package management, are interesting. I'm not so much interested in the distribution at the moment, more in the package manager. I imagine there aren't many supported packages yet, so it's a matter of writing scripts... eventually it can become a distribution. Not for everyone. But I still see no problem in more package managers being out there - any one has a problem with yum / apt being two different package managers? Why is yet another package manager is a bad thing?
  • laumars 14y ago
    I principle you are right. However in practice there is a sane point where there are so many competing solutions that you have to question why people don't spend their time improving existing solutions instead of adding to the fragmentation.
    • chongli 14y ago
      Sometimes you can't just improve an existing solution. It may be fundamentally different from what you intend to do (both technically and philosophically).
    • tedks 14y ago
      I highly recommend reading over some of the Nix papers -- what the author is doing is totally divergent from nearly every other package manager in a way that's either insane or brilliant (I don't personally know enough to judge). I saw his talk at a software upgrades workshop, and it was pretty impressive.
  • klrr 14y ago
    Well, I didn't mean to sound like I dislike the idea, hacker value can be as much reason as a problem to code a salvation.
• toolslive 14y ago
  maybe take a look here: http://nixos.org/docs/papers.html http://nixos.org/docs/papers.html from a theoretical, conceptual view point, nix is the holy grail in package management.
• dvdkhlng 14y ago
  Ever tried to build distribution packages? If it works for you, doesn't mean it works everywhere. Slight errors in the dependency specifications of a package may make it fail if you have wrongly versioned/missing libraries etc. It's often very difficult to verify that package dependencies are 100% correct. Sometimes package builds are not reproducable, as autoconf doesn't care about the build dependencies you defined but just adds any dependency it can auto-detect at compile-time. So you have to double-test your package when build on a build server etc. etc. AFAIU the Nix package manager fixes that by trying to assure bit-for-bit matching dependant packages are present by making every package version a hash of the installed files, hashed with the hash of all dependencies (similar somehow to how the filesystem/history data are managed in Git, BTW). The Nix package builder (named hydra) on the other hand makes sure that builds are performed in complete isolation via enhanced chroots, so that every build is 100% reproducible. It locks the build process down so much that it can't even access the network nor would the process be able to observe varying host names. [1] This is why they call it a "purely functional" build system. As in purely functional programming: there's no state at all. Inputs completely define the output. Now Guix sits on top of Nix and somehow attempts to make its features available on a higher level via a Scheme API (Nix uses its own language for package dependency and build descriptions) I haven't used Nix before, just read about it, but having suffered through writing complex package build recipies for OpenWrt, I very much appreciate the approach. [1] http://hydra.nixos.org/build/2860022/download/3/release-notes/ http://hydra.nixos.org/build/2860022/download/3/release-note...
  • klrr 14y ago
    Thanks for your information.