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.
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.
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.