[arch-general] pacman new generation

[Leonid Isaev]

On (11/22/11 11:30), Bernardo Barros wrote:
-~> If I still may:
-~> 
-~> roll-back and reproducible configuration was already proposed in the past?
-~> 
-~> The idea raised by Nix devs was the a purely functional approach was a
-~> way to implement it. Of course people can have similar ideas with
-~> other techniques.
-~> 
-~> If it a very practical question because I'm sure all Arch users in
-~> some point or another had to do a roll-back after a complex system
-~> update, and then they find themselves in a difficult situation to
-~> figure out how to revert all those changes.
-~> 
-~> Pro Audio users, for instance, might want to have their system
-~> configuration in a state just before the change that broke lv2 support
-~> on Ardour.
-~> 
-~> Nix approach may be not the only one, but their ideas let people see
-~> the difference between same packages build with different libs, or
-~> know to set a exact system configuration more easily.

But config files are always preserved, and severe breakage is avoided by using
testing. Where does the roll-back fit in here?

Next, it is OK to have /nix/store/<hash>-gcc, but what about
/nix/store/<hash>-libpng? Even a minor upgrade requires relinking? 

IMHO, somebody needed to write a phd thesis, so this problem came up. As a
research project NixOS is fine. But as a sustainable distro it's not. Another
example that is unlikely to lift off is Qubes OS which is probably the most
secure linux distro, but highly unpractical.

The question which I always have in such cases is why not bring your ideas to
something already mature like dpkg/rpm? Probably they did ask on respective ML
and got rejected after being unable to address the above and similar questions.

-- 
Leonid Isaev
GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D
Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
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