This is a good analysis. A potential option for his proposed build output format is http://nixos.org/nix/ expressions.
Nix is already kind of a fusion of a package manager and a build system. It's rather mature, has a decent ecosystem and does a lot of what he is looking for:
- Complete determinism, handling of multiple versions, total dependency graphs
- Parallel builds (using that dependency graph)
- Distribution
One major benefit of a solution like generating Nix files over compiler integration is that it works for cross-language dependencies. A lot of the time integrated solutions break down is for things like if a C extension of a Ruby gem relies on the presence of imagemagick. Nix has no problem handling that kind of dependency.
Also of course it is a lot less work to generate Nix expressions than it is to write a package manager. There are already scripts like https://github.com/NixOS/cabal2nix which already solve problems of the packaging system they replace.
Language specific tools (compiler in this case) could allow for things such as checking if library foo's api which library bar 'emulates' is sufficient for program c which depends on foo's API. With a lot more effort you could automate all dependency tracking and alternative library compatibility.
Comments
This is a good analysis. A potential option for his proposed build output format is http://nixos.org/nix/ expressions.
Nix is already kind of a fusion of a package manager and a build system. It's rather mature, has a decent ecosystem and does a lot of what he is looking for:
- Complete determinism, handling of multiple versions, total dependency graphs - Parallel builds (using that dependency graph) - Distribution
One major benefit of a solution like generating Nix files over compiler integration is that it works for cross-language dependencies. A lot of the time integrated solutions break down is for things like if a C extension of a Ruby gem relies on the presence of imagemagick. Nix has no problem handling that kind of dependency.
Also of course it is a lot less work to generate Nix expressions than it is to write a package manager. There are already scripts like https://github.com/NixOS/cabal2nix which already solve problems of the packaging system they replace.
Language specific tools (compiler in this case) could allow for things such as checking if library foo's api which library bar 'emulates' is sufficient for program c which depends on foo's API. With a lot more effort you could automate all dependency tracking and alternative library compatibility.