Ferk

I think it was Mandrake Linux for me.
It no longer exists though. …I guess I’m old.

The packager always should “explicitly require” what are the dependencies in a Nix package… it’s not like it’s a choice, if there are missing dependencies then that’d be a bug.

If the package is not declaring its dependencies properly then it might not run properly in NixOS, since there are no “system libraries” in that OS other than the ones that were installed from Nix packages.

And one of its advantages over AppImages is that instead of bundling everything together causing redundancies and inefficient use of resources, you actually have shared libraries with Nix (not the system ones, but Nix dependencies). If you have multiple AppImages that bundle the same libraries you can end up having the exact same version of the library installed multiple times (or loaded in memory, when running). Appimages do not scale, you would be wasting a lot of resources if you were to make heavy use of them, whereas with Nix you can run an entire OS built with Nix packages.

Huh? as far as I know it has its own libraries and dependency system. What do you mean?

The nice thing about Nix/Guix is that each version of a library only needs to be installed once and it wont really be “bundled” with the app itself. So it would be a lot easier to hunt down the packages that are depending on a bad library.

Flatpak still depends on runtimes though, I have a few different runtimes I had to install just because of one or two flatpaks that required them (like for example I have both the gnome and kde flatpak runtimes, despite not running either of those desktop environments)… and they can depend on specific versions of runtimes too! I remember one time flatpak recommended me to uninstall one flatpak program I had because it depended on a deprecated runtime that was no longer supported.

Also, some flatpaks can depend on another flatpak, like how for Godot they are preparing a “parent” flatpak (I don’t remember the terminology) that godot games can depend on in order to reduce redundancies when having multiple godot games installed.

Because of those things, you are still likely to require a flatpak remote configured and an internet connection when you install a flatpak. It’s not really a fully self contained thing.

Appimages are more self contained… but even those might make assumptions on what libraries the system might have, which makes them not as universal as they might seem. That or the file needs to be really big, unnecessarily so. Usually, a combination or compromise between both problems, at the discretion of the dev doing the packaging.

The advantage with Nix is that it’s more efficient with the users space (because it makes sure you don’t get the exact same version of a library installed twice), while making it impossible to have a dependency conflict regardless of how old or new is what you wanna install (which is something the package manager from your typical distro can’t do).

I feel it’s a balance. Each operation has a purpose.

Rebasing makes sense when you are working in a feature branch together with other people so you rebase your own commits to keep the feature branch lean before you finally merge it into the main branch, instead of polluting the history with a hard to follow mess of sub branches for each person. Or when you yourself ended up needing to rewrite (or squash) some commits to clean up / reorganize related changes for the same feature. Or when you already committed something locally without realizing you were not on sync with the latest version of a remote branch you are working on and you don’t wanna have it as a 1-single-commit branch that has to be merged.

Squashing with git merge --squash is also very situational… ideally you wouldn’t need it if your commits are not messy/tiny/redundant enough that combining them together makes it better.