On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:01 AM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thursday 16 Jun 2016 21:25:01 J. García wrote: > > How does Nix compare to flatpack, docker, snap, et al. from a gentoo > perspective? >
Nix is a similar sort of approach. I don't think they run apps in containers (though they probably could if they wanted to do the work and a lot of bind mounting). The reality is that they're a form of bundling, but the bundled libs can be shared. Basically everything is linked to uniquely identified dependencies. So, a package isn't just linked to zlib, or even a particular version of zlib, but a particular build of zlib. However, 15 different packages could all depend on that same build. So, you potentially don't get the same kind of memory duplication that you do with outright bundling. However, if you install a new version of zlib on your system, nothing will actually use it, unless those packages are themselves updated. So, in that respect it is just like bundling. Since the libraries you're running with on your box are exact copies of the binaries the packager was using, you're going to get the same experience the packager did when they were testing their package. So, that's the big upside. There are no conflicts or collisions either, since every package is installed in what amounts to a private namespace. You can have 14 different packaged builds of zlib-1.2.3 if you want to, with different builds being used by different applications. This is just my understanding based on having looked into NixOS a bit out of curiosity. Somebody closer to the project should feel free to correct any errors I made. There are obviously pros and cons to this approach. -- Rich
