unofficial mirror of guile-devel@gnu.org 
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
To: guile-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: guild hall expectations
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:45:40 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87ty8bi5wr.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 8739gd3hxz.fsf@pobox.com

Hi Andy!

And sorry for the late reply.

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> skribis:

> What I propose is that we do something like GNU stowfs does: install the
> files to a $DESTDIR, and then link them into place.  The $DESTDIR would
> be configurable, via dorodango's destination facility.  The linked-dir
> could be be the system, the user's ~/.local, or even into a specific
> project.  We would keep track of link mutations so that we could roll
> back, possibly to a version of a file controlled by the distro's package
> manager, though I don't think we'd implement that in the beginning.  It
> does at least allow us to detect conflicts with packages installed via
> other means.

Sounds like a good idea!

This is roughly what Nix does: there’s the “Nix store”, which contains
installed packages, and there’s the “profile”, which is a symlink forest
to what’s currently installed in the user’s environment.

The nice thing is that updating the symlink forest can be transactional:
prepare the new symlink forest somewhere and, when you’re done,
rename(2) the “current environment” symlink.  And, as you say, you could
keep links to previous environments, thus allowing for rollback.

However, if you take that route, you’ll also need a garbage collector to
reclaim installed packages not referred to by any of the environments
kept around.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

PS: FTR stowfs in practice is actually a unionfs,
    <https://www.gnu.org/s/hurd/hurd/translator/unionfs.html>.  The rest
    is abstract plans.  ;-)




      reply	other threads:[~2011-09-17 14:45 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-09-03 12:54 guild hall expectations Andy Wingo
2011-09-17 14:45 ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=87ty8bi5wr.fsf@gnu.org \
    --to=ludo@gnu.org \
    --cc=guile-devel@gnu.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).