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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

I already run my servers on docker. I was alluding to a containerized package manager.

Will the golden age of a single package manager across distro be finally possible through Docker?

Maybe... I think that if the question is "through runc compatible containers" than the answer is a definite YES, but through Docker is probably a no. Even the Docker folks tell me that I should stop using Docker and start using runc. Docker has a lot of design baggage from the server space, and when you cut that all away, you don't get much but a tiny bit of code that creates a namespace ;). But that tiny bit of code is really really revolutionary :D It is the difference between secure and reproducible isolation and "normal unix"...

What I would like to have in the future, that Docker does not provide, is deduplication. If I have two images with the same file in both, then I should be able to have that take up no more space than if there was one file in one place. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sc6_XgNXyk

Well, I mean... Docker does provide deduplication on the same base image. So two containers created "FROM ubuntu:14.04" which are both reading from (for example) /etc/issue are using the same data. But you specifically mention across different images, and I just don't think there are enough similarities to warrant that functionality. I mean how many files are the same across CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04? I just don't see the benefit that you do.

What about Nix (https://nixos.org/nix/)?

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