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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

See also:

- Nix: purely functional package manager that runs on multiple distros. 7/10 awesome ideas but difficult to work with.

- Guix: like Nix, but with Guile Scheme, and different packages. Seems to require system-wide installation and a daemon; also burdened with “freedom”. ??/10 haven’t tried it, but sounds iffy.

- Linuxbrew: Linux port/fork of the popular Homebrew package manager for macOS. 4/10 same problems as Homebrew itself.

- Gentoo Portage Prefix: build and run Gentoo packages in a $PREFIX, without root and on many different OSs. ??/10 haven’t tried it.

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"burdened with [scare quotes] freedom"

Wow. What a terrible way to describe a feature!

FWIW, Guix does not require system-wide installation, but it is strongly recommended to run the daemon as root to benefit from reproducibility mechanisms.

Saying that it sounds "iffy" for something you haven't tried and seem to misunderstand is not reasonable.

[Disclaimer: I'm hacking on Guix since many years and use it at work and privately.]

The OP is about package managers that an unprivileged user can deploy by themselves on arbitrary POSIX systems. Guix docs make it sound like it (a) needs root to work best, and (b) only targets GNU/Linux - hence iffy for those purposes.

Re: freedom - One persons feature is another’s useless restriction. I’d rather my package manager have strictly more software available, even if some of that software isn’t guaranteed GPL-compatible.

"guaranteed GPL-compatible"

This is a common misunderstanding. There's much more free software out there than software under the GPL. "Only providing free software" does not mean "only providing software under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license". That would be ludicrous.

Guix does not provide proprietary software and I consider this a feature.

I am curious to know what are the problem of homebrew itself ? As a generic user who has never done anything really complex with it, homebrew is a joy, it has never failed me.

Typically the problem areas would be in versioning of dependencies (in particular, resolving conflicting version requirements for different packages, where dependencies form a DAG rather than a tree) or around install hooks (where installation / removal can't be represented simply by existence / absence of whole files on the filesystem).

Nix is reproducible, supports easy rollbacks, and can manage multiple versions of everything for different projects. You don't have to worry about "works on my machine" or "don't update X right now because Y will break" when collaborating.

pkgsrc: NetBSD package repository that can also be used on Linux, inside any $PREFIX, without root: http://www.pkgsrc.org/

There is 0install too, I have never tried it though.

http://0install.net/

Last time I tried Prefix it didn't work or at least wasn't as convenient as I was expecting. I wish I could give more details than that but I can't remember now. I was and still am really excited by software like Prefix, however.

This is the only one of the bunch that I've been able to install some packages on RHEL5 and RHEL3 that I'm stuck with. (And even then, only with too much effort bootstrapping.)

Recommend giving a look at Exherbo's multiarch system.

Gobolinux also had something like that, but ended up mothballing it as they transitioned from /System/Links to /System/Index.

i am not sure if portage would work as an ordinary user, since compiling is made through a sandboxed user which i dont think is accessible through a normal user

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