I discovered GoboLinux not long ago and was disappointed to see it was no longer being maintained. It’s exciting to see some folks are picking it back up again.
I discovered GoboLinux not long ago and was disappointed to see it was no longer being maintained. It’s exciting to see some folks are picking it back up again.
I think the main premise is that every version of every software has its own installation prefix. This allows you to mix&match different versions, perform atomic upgrades, etc. You can think of it as a proto-Nix. TBH I don’t see much point in it now that Nix(OS) and Guix exist, or, if you don’t like their purity, stal/IX.
Well Nix and other immutable distros are about versioning with binary compatible layers that will be repeatable. Directory structure is already baked-in, so that’s sort of my point.
This project, from the docs at least, seemed like a week intentioned thing that has been handled and passed over in a different way.
Not sure I follow you entirely, but I think we agree.
so a bunch of versions of stuff to be compatible… like what flatpak does?
No, not quite. Flatpak is containers - it just stuffs every dependency that an application needs in a directory with no way to deduplicate or update independently. Gobo is a bit more nuanced, since dependencies are shared between applications when the versions match.
flatpak does indeed deduplicate. The stuff is updated to whatever is required as a dependency to whatever programs are installed. And versions are shared between applications when versions match as well…
So I am guessing it is just like flatpak
They only dedup runtimes, not individual dependencies.