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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

While I see the advantages and really enjoy this type of work (and the ones like Nix and OS-as-an-image efforts), I don't think it would be a one-true-solution in a one-size-fits-all construction.

Sometimes you want a single filesystem, sometimes you want multiple filesystems, sometimes you want an image copied into RAM and nothing more, sometimes you don't have the resources to even load something like FUSE.

I believe that if we are to make anything better we have to be able to either switch or combine the many ways one can make a modular or composable system.

We can already swap bootloaders, kernels, desktop environments, transplant storage from one system to another and continue working. It should be just a feasible to switch filesystem/package models.

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Certainly distri isn’t suitable for all environments, but I think the general concept can be very resource-efficient.

A few thoughts inline:

> Sometimes you want a single filesystem, sometimes you want multiple filesystems

distri presents packages in a single file system (mounted at /ro). The fact that there are many images underneath remains an implementation detail to the user.

> sometimes you don't have the resources to even load something like FUSE.

I suppose in those environments you just can’t have package management, then, given how light-weight FUSE is.

> We can already swap bootloaders, kernels, desktop environments, transplant storage from one system to another and continue working. It should be just a feasible to switch filesystem/package models.

Supporting more than one packaging model seems like an enormous task to me. I think distributions are better off not blowing up their test matrix like that :)

Super agree.

What would it take to make that a reality, though -- without, like secure's sibling comment says, blowing up the text matrix?

Which things would you make standardized (or conventional) to make switching easier?

What things would you strip out of consideration to make switching easier?

One of the things I like about Distri is that by questioning whether a bunch of inter-package interactions are necessary (and finding out that, often, the answer is "no"), it gets closer to a model of packaging where things are less prone to create either conflicts or sprawling dependency trees. That feels like a step in a good direction, at least, to me.

The most significant difference in this context are the separate hierarchies—programs need to be recompiled to work when made available under the /ro mount point.

I don’t see a way to avoid having two versions of a package when you want to support distri-style package management and traditional-style package management.

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