4 ms·

nix (http://nixos.org/nix/ http://nixos.org/nix/) seems to be the solution with the most potential in this area, solving all dependencies at the project level a

• Nullabillity 12y ago
  Also, per-user installs sweetens the deal even further.
• pmahoney 12y ago
  I've actually been exploring nix myself recently. It has some interesting features. I'm finding it quite nice to maintain some C-based packages across both Linux and Mac OS X (where it is somewhat of a competitor to Homebrew). I've been trying to get it to manage some Ruby applications, complete with gems, private github gems, etc. This has been difficult, in part because some areas of nix are a bit rough, and in part because Rubygems has incomplete dependency information (i.e. there's no standard way to know that, say typhoeus gem depends on C library libcurl, and I'm still unclear on how/if dynamic loading can be made to load the nix packaged libcurl). Something like nix is what I had in mind with my original question. I'd like to see new languages at least design their custom package managers with these more generic systems in mind. Rubygems has some quirks, and Bundler just includes everything and the kitchen sink (sourcing gems from local files, github, various other features) that complicate matters. Nix is good for keeping things more or less isolated and tracking complete dependencies, though an alternate way to accomplish similar is something like Docker and then just scripting all the native package managers...