Re: What about dependency resolution à la apt?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Howdy Amirouche!

Amirouche <address@hidden> skribis:

> Le 16/03/2017 à 21:28, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice a écrit :
>> Amirouche,
>>
>> On 16/03/17 19:52, Amirouche wrote:
>>> Héllo,
>> Hi!
>>
>> I'm not the most technically qualified person to answer this, nor the
>> most articulate, but I'm mainly curious and slightly puzzled as to why
>> this question keeps popping up.
>
> Sorry!

No problem, there’s nothing wrong with your question.

The key point in Tobias’ message is this:

>> But one of the many great things about functional package management à
>> la Nix/Guix is that you don't need — or want — a dependency resolver. At
>> all. That eliminates a lot of nasty problems, and makes others much
>> easier to solve.

Tools like apt allow developers to describe a (very large) set of
possible dependency graphs, which the dependency resolver tries hard to
narrow down to something reasonable.

Conversely, functional package managers describe just one dependency
graph.  The downside is the “security update” scenario, though we
address it with grafts¹, and the huge advantage is that we get tractable
build processes and package composition.

HTH!

Ludo’.

¹ https://gnu.org/s/guix/news/timely-delivery-of-security-updates.html