[erlang-questions] Erlang package manager

[Gleb Peregud]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 7:18 PM, Judson Lester <nyarly@REDACTED> wrote:
> I'm not the only one, but I'd like to raise another voice for Nix. The world
> has far too many package managers specific to either a virtual machine or an
> OS distribution, and it's kind of a nightmare.
>
> My understanding is that Nix Package Manager (as opposed to the closely
> related NixOS) fulfills all or almost all the requirements that people are
> talking about here, as well as allowing unprivileged users to install
> software, establishing different installation contexts on the same host
> (i.e. different versions of dependencies for different applications), and
> completely reproducible installs.
>
> But most attractive: it wouldn't be "the Erlang Package Manager" - it'd be
> "the Erlang application of Nix," which has at least three benefits: Erlang
> benefits from improvements to Nix, the Erlang community has a stronger basis
> for input on Nix, and anyone who's used Nix before but not Erlang has the
> barrier to trying Erlang lowered slightly.

I second this. Nix does solve most of these problems (if not all) in a
very principled, well-defined and consistent way, including:
- hermetic, verifiable and reproducible builds
- patch sets
- interoperation with other languages
- really fast
- transparent binary distribution of artifacts (obviously with
fallback to building from source)
- extensive caching of build artifacts
- private and public repositories
- unprivileged installation
- multiple version of the same package can coexist and won't conflict
- one command deployment (with all dependencies) to normal OS, to
Docker or to a cloud
- centralized configuration management
- developer-friendly
- etc. etc. etc.