Latest thoughts on user level package management

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015, at 03:41 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> This level would be developer components in a language and distro
> independent format. nix is the current frontrunner in my mind, mostly
> due to the good discussions between myself, Randy Barlow (Pulp) and
> Domen Kožar (NixOS), and the fact that Nix already uses the model of a
> central system-wide package store, with user and environment specific
> views into that store (this is a much nicer architecture for auditing
> purposes, since you can audit the package store directly, rather than
> having to check each environment).

Nix has a lot of good ideas, but I think *forcing* rebuilds of
dependencies makes it pretty impractical for use in many
scenarios.

The example I normally use is a glibc security update
meaning a rebuild of *everything* is just not realistic.

The user-level package management is interesting,
although it overlaps with:
 - xdg-app SDKs
 - Installing build tools as traditional RPMs
 - Docker derivation (works OK for scripting languages, less
   well for compiled languages with a strong build/runtime
   dependency split)