[colug-432] Stoopid Question

[Steve Roggenkamp]

A research distribution, Nixos (http://www.nixos.org) attempts to 
resolve this problem of library interference by completely redoing both 
the file system hierarchy and the software build process into a new 
packaging system called Nix.  From the website:

Nixos i** <http://nixos.org/nixos/>s a Nix-based Linux distribution. 
Thanks to Nix, it supports atomic upgrades, rollbacks and multi-user 
package management, and it has a declarative approach to system 
configuration management that makes it easy to reproduce a configuration 
on another machine.

Each time you build a package, it determines all of the dependencies 
needed to build the package and uses them, as well as the package 
contents to create a unique hash value for the package.  All packages 
get put into the /nix/store directory.  This makes in very easy to have 
multiple versions of a package without interfering with each other as 
well as being able to easily rollback changes or switch versions.  I'm 
also thinking it would make a very secure platform because it would be 
very difficult for attackers to figure out which library to replace or 
where critical programs reside.

Steve

Joshua Kramer wrote:
>> It's even worth considering putting the language itself outside the package
>> system (and therefore outside /usr). I don't know about Python, but that
>> seems to be the preferred direction in the Ruby world.
>>     
>
> In the RH 4 days when they had Python 2.2 and I required Python 2.4, I did 
> this.  Now the Pythons are sufficiently caught up that having extra 
> language installation causes confusion.  For example, if I were to do an 
> extraneous installation of Python 2.6 on a RHEL6 box, it would require me 
> to resolve library conflicts because the library loader would need to 
> differentiate between the shared libraries of the "system" Python and 
> those of the extraneous Python.
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