Anyone interested in a Package Manager in Ruby?

Hi, thanks Marc Weber.

nixpkgs (www.nixos.org) should also be known by you.

Yup, nixos is a GREAT idea. Always was much more sophisticated than
Gobolinux (I am still sad that Gobolinux is more or less dead :frowning: )

How I understood it though, NixOS does not retain the elegance and
simplicity of Gobolinux? Upgrades of programs are simple on Gobolinux
too, as is keeping settings. As said though, it is not as advanced
as NixOS, I think the ideal solution would be a mix of NixOS and
Gobolinux :wink:

a) ruby is supported pretty well :slight_smile:
b) it has many nice features such as atomic upgrades,
distributed building etc.

Interesting, especially the atomic upgrades while retaining 100% of
the old behaviour set.

I think in my current workflow, I'd prefer to use nixos on top of
an existing linux installation though. I have become very lazy
and reluctant to install something new, even if it may be better,
it kind of breaks my workflow, and I don't like that.

I mean that if I would have to install NixOS as a complete
distribution.

Thus before you write a new tool check it out and give it a
try. Don't think there are that many OSX users yet - but
the backbone of the system is pretty stable.

Yes, probably. My current idea here is that whoever has an itch
to scratch when compiling or installing something, a tool to
write or perhaps already has (in Ruby), he can find a place
to contribute without too much fuzz. Like an "umbrella" project
to store and gather useful scripts. (They need to integrate
though, hence perhaps may have to be adjusted. There would be
nothing worse than use 100 different tools that behave completely
inconsistent... that would only confuse users and developers.)

marc

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Excerpts from Marc Heiler's message of Sat Jul 16 04:10:44 +0200 2011:

Yup, nixos is a GREAT idea. Always was much more sophisticated than
Gobolinux (I am still sad that Gobolinux is more or less dead :frowning: )

It depends on what you want. nixpkgs was designed to generate results
you can regenerate on a different machine (if possible).
That's a unique feature. It was also designed to offer atomic upgrades.
From this point it follows that it should support multiple versions.
Because you may still be using

How I understood it though, NixOS does not retain the elegance and
simplicity of Gobolinux?

Well. Don't use a computer but a pencile. You can't be more simple :slight_smile:
I mean if you want the features described above you can't make it
simpler.

Interesting, especially the atomic upgrades while retaining 100% of
the old behaviour set.

Well - its not quite true. Application state (eg gimp's configuration)
is stored in ~/.gimp. Unfortunately it also has some pointers to
/nix/store/xxxxx-this-gimp-build. Thus if the hash xxx changes your
~/.gimp is broken. This results in gimp no longer being able to open
jpeg files. However this kind of problem is rare and it can easily be
fixed.

I think in my current workflow, I'd prefer to use nixos on top of
an existing linux installation though. I have become very lazy
and reluctant to install something new, even if it may be better,
it kind of breaks my workflow, and I don't like that.

nix: the package manager
nixos: the linux distribution based on nix (and the nixpkgs build
       descriptions).

The nice thing: because everything is in /nix/store it does not
interfere with your existing system much.

Do whatever you want :slight_smile: I wanted to make sure you don't miss nixpkgs
cause I think it the best system available. There are some drawbacks
though. Eg if you rebuild bash everything has to be rebuild because you
want deterministic results :confused:

yours
Marc Weber