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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

You misspelled Nixpkgs ;-)

I'm kidding, of course, but IIRC pkgsrc (and alikes, such as APT) has a number of limitations, for example a very limited ability to have multiple versions of the same package installed, making it less than optimal replacement.

(I believe a lot of people depend on ability to spin up a new version while the old is running, then do the cutover and shut down the old one after it's not is use.)

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Capabilities aside, if you're reproducible and source-based, you're gonna survive binary artifact repository outages a lot better than if you're not.

If there were a comparable culling of the Nixpkgs binary cache, pipelines relying on Nix for their packages would be affected in a much less invasive way: they'd see Nix silently fall back to upstream sources, and reproducibly build from source, wherever the caches binary artifacts became unavailable.

Also it has unprivileged builds, installations, packages rooted anywhere in filesystem, completely self-contained dependencies.

> APT ... has a number of limitations

...and crucial features, like having security fixes backported.

What you're alluding to is an Ubuntu decision about what goes into their repos, and has nothing to do with apt itself.

If anything it's usually a Debian decision. But it's more than that.

And Guix, too. Specially Guix.

pkgsrc allows installation of multiple versions of same package ;)

Concurrently, with both versions usable? I was not aware of this. Could you please give me a brief primer how it works? Thanks!

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