[kalefranz]

There's been quite a bit of discussion about Anaconda and conda in this thread already. Anaconda also takes this distribution approach, and it's targeted specifically at python.

[ris]

Yet it will never be able to solve the system-library dependency problem in the way that Nix does.

[RayDonnelly]

It solves this already and has done for many years (but this depends on what you mean exactly by "the way that Nix does").

[kalefranz]

Can you elaborate? Conda packages have full metadata descriptions for system-level dependencies. I agree with you that conflicts and diamond dependencies lurk everywhere, which is precisely the reason Conda employs a SAT solver.