On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 3:38 AM John Newman <[1]jnn@synfin.org> wrote:

     > On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:12 AM, Tom <[2]tom@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.:
     >
     > [3]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 ;-)
   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.
   "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.

References

   1. mailto:jnn@synfin.org
   2. mailto:tom@vondein.org
   3. https://xkcd.com/927/