[pxc]

> so (from my perspective), they punted the entire concept of making what I would refer to as a "layer aware linux distribution"

Would you consider there to be any 'layer-aware Linux distributions' today, e.g., NixOS, GuixSD, rpm-ostree-based distros like Fedora CoreOS, or distri?

> so much duplicate layers out in the world

Have you seen this, which lets existing container systems understand a Linux package manager's packages as individual layers?

https://github.com/pdtpartners/nix-snapshotter

[mananaysiempre]

(Not GP.)

NixOS can share its Nix store with child (systemd-nspawn) containers. That is, if you go all in, package everything using Nix, and then carefully ensure you don’t have differing (transitive build- or run-time) dependency versions anywhere, those dependencies will be shared to the maximum extent possible. The amount of sharing you actually get matches the effort you put into making your containers use the same dependency versions. No “layers”, but still close what you’re getting at, I think.

On the other hand, Nixpkgs (which NixOS is built on top of) doesn’t really follow a discipline of minimizing package sizes to the extent that, say, Alpine does. You fairly often find documentation and development components living together with the runtime ones, especially for less popular software. (The watchword here is “closure size”, as in the size of a package and all of its transitive runtime dependencies.)

[pxc]

> On the other hand, Nixpkgs (which NixOS is built on top of) doesn’t really follow a discipline of minimizing package sizes to the extent that, say, Alpine does. You fairly often find documentation and development components living together with the runtime ones, especially for less popular software. (The watchword here is “closure size”, as in the size of a package and all of its transitive runtime dependencies.)

Yep. I remember before Nix even had multi-output derivations! I once broke some packages trying to reduce closure sizes when that feature got added, too. :(

Besides continuing to split off more dev and doc outputs, it'd be cool if somehow Nixpkgs had a `pkgsForAnts` just like it has a `pkgsStatic`, where packages just disable more features and integrations. On the other hand, by the time you're really optimizing your Nix container builds it's probably well worth it to use overrides and build from source anyway, binary cache be damned.

[compsciphd]

I'll try to get back to this to give a proper response, but can't promise.