> Of course distro-hoppers are going to struggle to understand how their distros work! To distro-hop is to enact a commitment to not understanding your distro!!
Fair point. :-)
> I what that generational gap says for the viability (in terms of user acceptance) of the Nix store in all its ugly glory in the future.
I think there's a word, or several, or maybe just a letter or two, missing here.
But yes, I thought of that, too.
What irks me a little is that the Nix folks I've spoken to seem to feel that they have simply fixed this issue now, and nothing more need be done. While in fact I think there is a lot more work to be done here, and maybe GoboLinux and Spack and things show the way.
The (to me) madness of things like Btrfs volumes, layering another filesystem namespace on top of the Unix one, allowing insanity like multiple distros in one partition:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/742392/can-i-use-bt...
Or installing Windows on Btrfs:
https://www.lilysthings.org/blog/windows-on-btrfs/
Hints at other approaches. As in: why not both? Maybe it's possible to have multiple _views_ of a filesystem, so via one API you "see" a flat namespace with hashed directories, and with another a conventional hierarchical one -- just as a Gmail account can be viewed as flat and hierarchical at the same time using an IMAP client.
This isn't over. There's some distance to go yet.
Fair point. :-)
> I what that generational gap says for the viability (in terms of user acceptance) of the Nix store in all its ugly glory in the future.
I think there's a word, or several, or maybe just a letter or two, missing here.
But yes, I thought of that, too.
What irks me a little is that the Nix folks I've spoken to seem to feel that they have simply fixed this issue now, and nothing more need be done. While in fact I think there is a lot more work to be done here, and maybe GoboLinux and Spack and things show the way.
The (to me) madness of things like Btrfs volumes, layering another filesystem namespace on top of the Unix one, allowing insanity like multiple distros in one partition:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/742392/can-i-use-bt...
Or installing Windows on Btrfs:
https://www.lilysthings.org/blog/windows-on-btrfs/
Hints at other approaches. As in: why not both? Maybe it's possible to have multiple _views_ of a filesystem, so via one API you "see" a flat namespace with hashed directories, and with another a conventional hierarchical one -- just as a Gmail account can be viewed as flat and hierarchical at the same time using an IMAP client.
This isn't over. There's some distance to go yet.