Re: [OT, deeply] Guix

[didier gaumet <didier.gaumet@gmail.com>]

Le mardi 26 octobre 2021 à 09:25 -0400, Stefan Monnier a écrit :
[...]
> Think of it this way: currently, you can more or less figure out
> which
> packages you decided to install on your machine by going through the
> list
> of installed packages and filtering out all those that are marked as
> "automatically" installed.
> 
> But you can only manipulate this list indirectly, via `apt install`
> and
> `apt remove`.

to have the list of all automatically installed packages:
# apt-mark showauto

to have the list of all manually installed packages:
# apt-mark showmanual

to verify if the package PACKAGE have been automatically installed
# apt-mark showauto $PACKAGE

to verify if the package PACKAGE have been manually installed
# apt-mark showmanual $PACKAGE


> In contrast, with NixOS/Guix that list is available in a plain text
> editable file. 

in Debian there is /var/lib/apt/extended_states

>  And in order to add a package or remove a package you
> can edit that list and then say something akin to "make" which will
> add/remove the needed packages to bring the system to the state
> described in the file.
> 
> Another, slightly more subtle, benefit is that you'll always get the
> same system state from a given description.  In contrast, with
> Debian,
> I have several Debian `testing` machines on which I have installed
> and
> removed over the years the same set of packages, but not exactly in
> the
> same order, and with a different interleaving of `apt upgrade`, and
> the
> result is that they don't all have exactly the same packages
> installed,
> and some suffer from problems that I don't see in the others.
>

Perhaps (not sure) comparing on each machine the results of 
# apt-cache unmet
could give you valuable info

> With the NixOS/Guix approach, it's much easier to make sure the
> systems
> are truly identical.
> 
> It's not been enough to convince me to switch, but I do wish Debian
> would try and take some of those ideas.  I think part of it could be
> done all within a new APT-like tool without any change to Debian
> itself
> (the part that decides which packages should be installed and removed
> based on some text file describing the desired configuration of the
> system).
> 
> 
>         Stefan "happy Debian user since 2003"
> 
>