GNU Guix launches [LWN.net]

GNU Guix launches

Posted Nov 27, 2012 17:17 UTC (Tue) by davidescott (guest, #58580)
In reply to: GNU Guix launches by davidescott
Parent article: GNU Guix launches

After submitting I went back and rereading my comment and realized that you were responding to my response to phoddie's description of VMs as perverse sledgehammers.

You are correct that my previous comment is not correct with respect to how Nix operates. My point (poorly expressed) was that a package manager is either going to introduced a combinatorial explosion of potential conflicts or be VM-lite by supporting independent package installations.

I'm objecting to the suggestion that VMs are a perverse sledgehammer. I think they are a very good sledgehammer to quickly roll out lots of independently configured instances. If Nix+Containers can accomplish that while eliminating some duplication then VM-lite may be preferable to pure VM, but that has nothing to do with user-installed packages.

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GNU Guix launches

Posted Nov 28, 2012 13:39 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

To be fair, I use virtualisation in the broadest sense myself, but when you have package management systems like opkg which appear to be able to operate for unprivileged users in their own chosen areas of the filesystem, having to use "virtualisation" even at the level of maintaining separate chroot environments has to be seen as a kludge and not the product of two virtuous technologies coming together to "solve" an apparently unsolvable problem. If anything, it just pushes the complexity avoided by the somewhat overly conservative design decisions of the package management systems concerned onto some other activity instead.