I may have understood. In any case, I like what NixOS is trying to achieve, but there’s lots of hurdles and deep knowledge of both Linux and nixpkgs needed to start trying to be productive. I never had to deal with EFL patching before, which is handy to know.
The whole problem with Linux and C++ in general is it doesn’t have a nice package management system. Everything is ad-hoc, and the existence of “distros” is practically due to the need for package management solutions, and teams to manage the packaging of all applications.
It is the reverse of a modern package management ecosystem like NPM, where the application developer is responsible for packaging and shipping a package, then anyone else can consume it without replicating all of that work.
There’s a package manager called ied that takes NixOS inspiration (hashing dependencies), but the rest of ied’s behavior is just standard NPM, and it allows any package to depend on any version of any other package.
Now here with Nix we have a package manager that is trying to allow any package to depend on any version of any other package, but the issue is that the underlying system (FHS, etc) that each package is conventionalized on is completely in the way, and required Nix users to create sub-shells with fake FHS environments or patched ELF binaries. It’s basically hacking the very old system to bend it to newer ideas.
Instead, maybe the whole reliance on FHS packages should just be dropped, and instead something decoupled from FHS and ELF (and etc) would be a better path.
There’s package manager called Conan for C++ projects that sort of resembles NPM, but for C++. Maybe that, and NPM, can be looked at, and something better created, and then a new operating system built on top of it.
I’m not sure how Conan works exactly, but I know that each of my projects using Conan can have any dependencies they want regardless of version, and they just work, without me having to patch my shell, or without me having to be aware of how to patch ELF (I don’t know if Conan does that or not).
But the key thing about Conan is, it does not interfere with my overall operating system. It leaves my OS in tact, and I don’t need to continually tweak my working environment (like I do in NixOS) to run programs that depend on differing dependencies. That’s a huge benefit.
I see a better future in making an operating system that allows packages to be built independently, rather than all packages relying on globally installed packages.
I don’t know exactly what the solution is, but I believe it should be OS agnostic without depending on specific OS features, and any dependence on the filesystem only needs to happen at the location where a project is being built.