Re: What about dependency resolution à la apt?

[Amirouche <amirouche@hypermove.net>]

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!

> I hope others will join in, since I fear
> this hints at some fundamental misunderstandings about Guix that might
> hurt world d^W^W adoption.

Maybe patch the FAQ?

>
>> AFAIU guix does hardcode the dependencies so that to know the
>> dependencies one has onlytocrawl the dependency DAG using a BFS or
>> something. I don't know what is the exact part in guix that does
>> that. It's only my understanding.
> This doesn't happen.[1]
>
> It takes some getting used to when you're used to old-school package
> managers where the resolver is A Big Deal, or even The Biggest Deal:
> Gentoo, anyone?

Yes.. But autoconf does the same, it specify some dependency
that can match patch or minor version number.

> 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.
>
> Huge Deal.
>
>> What about having apt-like dependency resolution, also like npm
>> where version are specified in terms of "superior to", "equal to"
>> taking advantage of semantic versionning?[2]
> Guix already does ‘equal to’ better than anyone. Bit-identical, even.

That's is off topic?