alt Hacker NewsThe concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago. It's ridiculous that the usual situation for non-root users is "you can't install XY but feel free to build from source". Homebrew, Mise and Nix are filling that hole now. (Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps, and Snap... exists.)
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At the very least, Linux package managers should have some concept of different layers of packages.
For example, there might be layers for “system” (core components), “environment” (display manager, DE, etc), and “user”, each of which are maintained fully separately so they can’t ever step on each others’ toes and break things. Yes, it means there will be some redundancy but for all the trouble and complexity it’s saving I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
One of the frustrating limits historically with some of these is that when you're already an unprivileged user it's been difficult or impossible to get to a sandboxed environment to perform hermetic or untrusted builds. So like with nix for example you could do a user install and then builds would build as your user, but if you installed as root, then builds would delegate out properly to nixbld users.
This has gotten better in recent years with user namespaces but it takes time for it to be adopted and achieve parity with what used to be just jumping to a user who can only write to a newly created dir in tmp.
PufPufPuf wrote:
> The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago.
Each one uses their own package manager right?
What I hate is that e. g. debian puts me to conform to their FHS. I want things installed into versioned AppDirs. GoboLinux allows that; NixOS to some extent too (though they used hashed directory names). Debian does not allow me to do that. I don't want to conform to what others wrote; I want software that adjusts to my wants.
> Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps
Have they not recently added a mandatory systemd dependency? I can't use software that things it must force software I don't need or use onto me.
I haven't looked much into snap but it seems very heavyweight from the few things I've tried, which downloaded what looked like an entire OS and filled up my disk and RAM. And the fact that you run `snapd` to install a package is just... odd.
In Debian-Ubuntu it's become a standard pattern to use `curl` or `wget` to add a third-party `deb` repo with keychain integration, because for whatever reason there's still no `apt` command for this obvious scenario. Really grinds my gears.