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Comment by bobajeff | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of nixos. Having one file responsible for all packages installed on the system is way better than what traditional distro use. I just don't like the quality of the packages. It would be nice if someone could do something like a os wide packages.json but for a mature packages repository like Debian.

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Which package did you have issues with?

I think I remember having issues with the Kate package. There might have been others but that's the one that stuck for me.

it could be a myriad of things. Getting some features working requires searching around the internet, like getting spell checking working was... interesting.

I know. I've looked into it and am pretty sure it was a missing optional build dependency during the build of the package. The feature is obscure enough that it was easily overlooked by the maintainer who in all likelihood doesn't even use kde.

Alpine linux has a /etc/apk/world which is just a full list of all the packages currently installed

I'm not a fan of nix but I'd say the nixos repository is fairly mature.

nixpkgs is (and has been for many years) the largest and most up to date package set by a very large margin.

source: https://repology.org/

i know, just was responding to the mention of maturity in the parent

Nix respiratory has a lot of good work done in it but I've found some bad packages.

Alpine also sounds like a nice system but I'd bet it has an even worse issue with bad packages because of musl.

And gentoo has /var/lib/portage/world, and pacman has "pacman -Qe", and apt has "apt-mark showmanual".

...I sometimes wonder how the world would be if the "explicitly installed packages" functionality was better exposed and advertised. I never see any guide for "installing development dependencies" use things like "pacman -S --asdeps" so you can clean them up later.

Thank you 'apt-mark showmanual' is useful. Even better using synaptic you can the click the `Installed (manual)` status filter.

Still not as good as something like npm's `package.json` where it's a human edited list of packages you want installed and it's in the order that you added them in (if you ran `npm install $package-name`). Which is nice when you want to remove one you don't need anymore.

I wonder if it's possible hack a declarative package manger into a Debian system. Like a wrapper around apt that can do all of this.

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