Stewart Stremler wrote: > > I've been wanting a package management system that can rebuild the > package database from what's actually installed, just for this reason. > If I uninstall something and it *still* leaves crap around, I'm going > to reach for rm -rf, dammit. > > The fact that "package management systems" can't (easily) handle that > is a sign that they aren't there yet. > > Oddly enough, Sun's package system *can* handle manual additions and > removals, but the commands are slightly obscure and not often used, > so far as I can tell. >
http://nix.cs.uu.nl/nixos/ This link was shared a while back by Trace Reed, I think. I've been looking at it again myself just recently. The link is to the homepage of Nixos... a Linux distribution. The main feature is that it is based on the Nix package manager, which can apparently be used with any distro. I haven't used it as of yet. It *doesn't* have the VCS features AFAICT, but it handles changes to the system as a changeset... and it _doesn't_ destroy the old configuration and binaries. You can have the new and old configs and binaries side by side without them impacting one another. If the changes are unacceptable, then rolling them back is easy. Furthermore, packages are user-installable (no root needed) packages are installed in their own directories. (dirnames have a prepended hash string to make them unique from other builds with same name/version) The configuration (profile) to be used can be defined by each user. Configurations are stored and can be rolled back and controlled. Works with source packages and binaries. The website says that one user's installations will not impact any other users. However, if a second user decides to install the same package, nix will reuse the first package. Sounds to me like it certainly *could* affect another user. Packages are removed when there are no more "references" to it, a la garbage collection. And are actually deleted from the disk when a command is issued to do so. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
