2009/3/6 Archie Cobbs
I thought folks on this list would be interested to read this article about Nix:
I would avoid the expression "dependency hell" since it's too vague and usually used by uninformed people. I would also avoid say thing like "All popular package managers, including APT, RPM", since people will ignore you if you are talking about package managing and you don't understand the difference between DPKG and APT (or RPM and ZYpp). Still, the idea is interesting. Even if I would need to look better, specially about this "cryptographic hash" that is supposed to look at anything that would create an incompatible package. Say Firefox depends on packages libA 2.14 and libB, and libB depends on libA 2.2. libA 2.14 is loaded first and even if libB is compiled against libA 2.2, at runtime the linker will resolve the symbols against libA 2.14... and Firefox crashes. Is the "cryptographic hash" smart enough to see these problems? I'm also not very sure about how the software from NIX packages interacts with the "base distro" (but that would not be a problem is their own distro, NixOS). The FONTCONFIG_FILE thing doesn't sound good. And anyway it has the usual problems. Do you really want to load three or four different copies of GTK in memory? Memory is finite. If someday I see this "NixOS" in the top ten of Distrowatch I will try it. But I don't see anything the openSUSE project can or needs to do about this Nix package manager. A Nix package can be created (anyone is free to do so in the OBS) to make easier the installation... but after that Nix packaged software runs "separated" from the main distro, with even his own copy of libc. It's basically a different distro running over openSUSE. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org