Nguyễn Gia Phong via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <[email protected]> writes:
> On 2025-12-24, Andrew Nesbitt wrote: >> Databases have CHECK constraints and UNIQUE constraints; >> git has nothing, so every package manager builds >> its own validation layer. Databases have locking; git doesn’t. >> Databases have indexes for queries like >> "all packages depending on X"; with git >> you either traverse every file or build your own index. > > This is funny because it precisely describe Guix d-; > The problem with developing directly on a database though > is there's no colaborative tooling for it AFAIK. > > In brief, aside from guix pull it does not seem to me > like there is much can be done without going back to the drawing board, > but I'm no expert on this and wish to be corrected. > > Best wishes, > Phong Just chiming in that this reminds me of fossil-scm (https://fossil-scm.org/home), although for various reasons it isn't itself suitable as a replacement. Even for something like Guix, the big server databases aren't necessarily called for. SQLite can scale pretty well for single users or a few concurrent (although it cannot handle thousands, a public site would need one of the server databases). An SQL representation portable across the various DBMSes is possible. - Aurora
