Hacker News Reader

I'm an Arch user. I love pacman. So easy to use.

But I would personally much rather see pacman (and every other distro-locked package distribution format) dropped where everyone adopted debs or rpms.

What I would like the most, though, is that the most logically technically advanced and easy to use package manager win, and everyone just adopt that. I know that pacman makes building package builds insanely easy, compared to debs or rpms.

> Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?

A couple of points:

- one example does not plenty make

- Nix has a really interesting technical design. However, it trades the ability to patch security holes across your entire system for the ability to install multiple packages side by side and have atomic upgrades.

More importantly (I was lying about the two points), the package manager is tied intimately to the guts of the distro, it's much less shocking than having Ubuntu implement Unity.

Now, we'll see what becomes of Mir. Whatever mindshare Upstart had went straight to systemd as soon as it came out. If Mir is primarily an expression of hubris, I expect it will follow Upstart in obscurity. If Canonical manage to convince enough developers in the community, they may get something going.

It's not the same. Unity heavily relies on Ubuntu specific patches. There was quite some effort to get unity running under arch Linux

"better" is generally subjective. there's a reason why nixos, upstart, etc, don't catch on.

For pacman vs nix, well, pacman is extremely simple. Extremely reliable. Nix has some design advantages, but that don't translate all that well in the practical world right now. Maybe in the future.