software - multiple version installs (any distro developers here?)

[John]

On August 23, 2016 5:56:39 PM EDT, Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 3:38 AM John Newman <jnn at synfin.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> > On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:12 AM, Tom <tom at vondein.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 01:30:17PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
>> >> A major distro heading that way (e.g. Debian) might encourage
>developers
>> >> to increase the configurability of their own software perhaps?
>> >
>> > Developers != distro|package maintainers, and free software should
>be
>> > portable and not distro specific. So, developers wouldn't have
>anything
>> to
>> > do here, only maintainers.
>> >
>> >> Ahah! Yes so we need a new default packaging/ installation format
>to be
>> >> supported by RPM and DPKG, to support the better way, e.g.:
>> >
>> > https://xkcd.com/927/  :)
>> >
>> >> So look into /var/lib/dpkg/info - that's heading for 9K files on
>my
>> >> system - and this is a relatively fresh install (<12months)!
>> >>
>> >> That's not human friendly.
>> >
>> > Because humans are not the intended audience for this stuff.
>> > Use dpkg -l [| less or the like].
>> >
>> >> The point is just multiple versions parallel installs, that's all.
>> >
>> > There are already solutions for this, e.g. look at PC-BSDs
>packages.
>> > Or use a container. Or compile yourself and
>>
>> Docker might be a little big for every binary in the system ;).  I
>tend to
>> agree that the base system is ok without being a bunch of symlinks,
>but
>> doing something like this for /usr/local does work great on OSX with
>> homebrew (which is written in ruby btw)
>>
>
> +1 for Homebrew on Macs, but then you're using a Mac ;-)
>

I just got dual display functionality working properly on my hackintosh. For years I ran only Linux or FreeBSD at home but I'm afraid I was rather seduced by the combination of Unix and good UI / apps that Mac OSX brought...and when combined with the low price point of a hackintosh (and the big fuck you to capitalism), it's hard to resist... Of course I still use a Linux desktop at work, primary hosted server is freebsd, etc. ..


>There's also Nix and its GNU NIH copy Guix, which can be installed in
>your
>homedir or /usr/local on most Unix-like systems. They both have the
>added
>advantage of having any number of separate "profiles" (i.e. symlink
>farms)
>for building packages, doing day-to-day stuff, etc. And since they
>modify
>the system monotonically, you can always roll back packages (but not
>any
>non-versioned state) semi-atomically, take snapshots (which you could
>do
>with ZFS anyway), etc.

Somehow I've never played with this particular piece of software... Will check out.

>"Docker for everything" is not a totally off the wall idea. Not
>specifically docker but namespaces & cgroups for making software that's
>used to Unix-like discretionary access controls and make it act more
>like
>object-capability software. You'd need a UI or shell or something for
>expressing what capabilities to pass along, for example something that
>interprets annotated filenames, converts them to filenames in the
>process's
>own namespace, and handles mounting the files into the process's
>namespace.
>Of course, then you're probably just reinventing SELinux or something,
>though I do think there's potential there to make the user interface a
>little less obtuse than SELinux policies.

I don't need /bin/ls and /bin/cp and /bin/[insert simple base util here] wrapped in a container and never found SELinux worth the hassle, but I suppose some people might want that level of headache... ;).  


John

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