hmm
would a #plan9 package manager be a good idea? 🤔
it sure doesn't need one now but... if there was more software for it???
@grainloom Would it be a filesystem?
@enkiv2 I think so. If it's anything like pacman it would need to be a proper union file system (which afaik Plan 9's is not) and it would probably need some caching to make lookups faster.
So you could maybe do something like
% echo 'require lua-5.2' >> /srv/packagefs
and a subsequent
% /bin/lua
would find the relevant version
it's like #guix and #nix except you have to do less fighting against the OS
@enkiv2 @grainloom how do you define 'subsequent'? does package installation race with program execution?
@martensitingale @enkiv2 I mean, probably... but the echo will block until the package is mounted and afaik #Plan9 file servers usually use coroutines, so there shouldn't be a situation where one thread is still registering the packages and the other is trying to serve it to a client.
@enkiv2 @martensitingale
And if the package handling service is separate from the union file system service then you don't even have to worry about dependency resolution blocking your file server.