What do package managers do? Install packages, obviously! But that is not everything. In my opinion, package managers do enough to be characterized as general automation frameworks. For example:
- manage configurations and configuration files
- manage custom compilation options and flags
- provide isolation or containerization
- make sure a specific file is present in a specific place given specific conditions
- change installation files or configuration based on architecture or other conditions
Not all package managers do all of the above, but you get the idea.
Nix even manages your entire setup with a single configuration file.
It occurred to me that package management could theoretically be managed by an automation framework.
What do I mean by automation framework? Ansible, chef, puppet, or Sparrow.
Now imagine if you were to use one of those package managers as an automation framework. For most of them, it would suck. (nix is a notable exception). So maybe common package managers are just bad automation frameworks?
What if we used an automation framework as a package manager? Well currently, it might also suck, but only because it lacks the package definitions. Maybe it is not a bad experiment to have a distribution managed by a modern automation framework like Sparrow.
What are the benefits?
- usable on other distributions
- more easily create your own packages on the fly
- Greater customization and configurability
- use a known programming language that is easy to read to define packages and other functions, instead of a DSL
- your package manager can easily automate just about any task using the same syntax and framework
I can very interested in Nix. The only thing making me hesitate is that it is a bit opinionated. There’s a “Nix way of doing things” rather than a general automation framework than can do anything. Am I wrong in thinking this as an outside observer?
Well, the Nix way is declarative. You could just declare “I want a file with the following contents” and it will work
But it’s better if someone already wrote an option that lets you enable the features you want. So ideally if it doesn’t exist you write it yourself. That way you can contribute it to nixpkgs for everyone to use