Gentoo’s Portage and NixOS’ Nix are both interesting takes on package management. Both are powerful and open up a ton of flexbility to the user, but still do a lot of work for you.
Are there any other similarly interesting approaches to the package management problem?
Guix is another one. https://guix.gnu.org/
Is guix much different from Nix? I remember that it uses scheme instead of nix language, that it is more free-software purist, and also has less packages than nix. Are there any benefits?
Guix re-implemented the Nix package manager on Guile, so yes, though similar in principle, they are different, and if you go beyond the package manager, to the Guix system vs NixOS the differences are even bigger. So it’s more than OK to mention them separately.
I haven’t personally used these, but after some searching I found a few relatively new and experimental twists to the formula:
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distri uses SquashFS images for all their packages and claims to be very fast:
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spack is also a Nix-inspired package system that’s python-based, and it seems to allow for a lot of customization, you can even modify the dependencies / build parameters of a package when installing it.
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flox is compatible with Nixpkgs, it seems to be an iteration on the idea with some improvements.
I wish there had been more movement on distri; it was quite promising, but it shows all signs of being dead.
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To me, Sorcery from Sourcemage GNU+Linux it’s pretty flexible and and really appealing. As Gentoo, Sourcemage is a source based GNU+Linux distribution, but it was my preferred one for a long time, just that I couldn’t keep up with having to build everything, :), but it’s also way cool to cast spells, rather than install packages, :)
Ah, the great granddaddy of Sourcemage, and I believe “Lunar Linux”, if it’s still around, was very dear to my heart - Sorcerer Linux, from which they both were forked.
Kyle eventually came up with an odd license for Sorcerer, probably due to his feelings following those forks, and Sorcerer may even predate Debian (but not Slackware - still the oldest extant and quite relevant distro), while SuSE began affectionately as 'the German Slackware fork, so maybe it predates Sorcerer too?
Anyway, if you look at all of the distros I’ve just mentioned (I should include Arch Linux in this list) they all have a source, or at least a rolling distro philosophy at heart. Debian is certainly package based, but Debian Testing (Sid too, and LMDE is or was) a true rolling distro along with Arch, which is more directly source based.
I don’t mean to leave out Gentoo (or Funtoo), but it’s very well known as a source based distro - moreso when you d/l’d it as Stage 1, 2, or 3 (methodology abandoned a long time ago).
People think that Slackware is package based like Debian too, and they would be correct, but everything after a full install is source based, SlackBuilds actually d/l the source from the various repos, then compile and make the package. You use one of a number of tools in ‘package tools’ to simply install the package, which takes a few seconds.
At the higher level you have dependency management and resolution (to your particular liking, too) using completely automated solutions like ‘sbopkg’, which uses customizable queue files for your deps and then downloads and compiles the source, creates the package, and installs it or a boatload of packages on one fell swoop while you make s sandwich.
The entire core operating system from a full (the recommended method) install can in one command, be completely recompiled and installed one your system in place - that means it’s also true too day that Slackware is equally a source based distribution too… But that’s not all.
Slackware -current is a fully rolling distro, and you can follow the daily changelog here:
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64
You can also quickly create packages and install them from rpms and .debs, but most systems have those sorts of utilities, and people do maintain package repos, but the Slackware crowd has always been a but hesitant about installing packages that other people have made - you can read a SlackBuild though, in a very few lines you see the fetch, compile, and packaging. You can even add the line to install the package - it’s all just shell script.
Sorcerer was a different breed however, after you install it once or twice (much like installing Gentoo from a stage one CD) that part of it no longer really much fun. Maintaining it can be, and the coolest thing about doing it back when on say, a 486DX2-66, is that your get to come home from work in the afternoon and your PC is still churning away like crazy, instead of just waiting very quickly - it would be such a shame for it to just sit there, lolz.
Sorcerer was all Bash, everything was a bash script. you could scry and cast spells, a lot of thematic corollaries to what Sourcemage is like. And then one day he just said he was done and that was it. I talked to him a few years later but yeah, kinda melancholy when a fav distro fades away. I felt that way about Mandrake Linux too. Mageia never really stuck with me, although I did work with it until the official general release. Mandriva is still going too.
Well, i just thought that I’d relate a few things about Slackware and I came across you mentioning Sourcemage and thought that was kewl 😎
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a bit outdated, perhaps partial, :) https://sourcemage.org/History
As I said, way cool the codex, the grimoire, the spells, the casting, the dispelling, scribe, resurrect, summon, and so on. And as well as with other source based distros, with the advantages on x86 to really get binaries for the CPU in the HW… I moved to Arch when realizing it was not possible for me to keep up with all the building, and I was strict about rebuilding the whole system when there were gcc upgrades for example (but it was cool as well to experience how simple it was with sourcemage to rebuild everything, keeping in mind dependencies and all that), and then to Artix when, ohh well, doesn’t matter any more… Next, probably Guix, but one can easily get to miss the AUR, and easy of creating a self custom repo. With sourcemage and arch/artix creating our own custom packages, and our own custom repos is really easy and fast, which is hard to compete against, and then one can really get addict to the AUR, :)
Maybe Void’s XBPS.
VanillaOS has a very basic core system (currently Debian) and builds a completely vanilla GNOME desktop using Nix, .deb, Flatpak, or AppImage. Various package managers can be used to build an application inside of a container. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m planning to give it a try.
Edit: I wasn’t completely correct. It relies on Flatpak or AppImage for the desktop, but allows you to install packages from Arch and Fedora in containers that get exposed to the host OS. Nix is not yet supported.
