Есть такой интересный пакетный менеджер, Nix.

Nix is a purely functional package manager. It allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software, and has many other features. It is the basis of the NixOS Linux distribution, but it can be used equally well under other Unix systems.

Функционально(сорри за каламбур) Nix превосходит большинство существующих менеджеров пакетов. Хотелось бы раздобыть и саму NixOS, которая является воплощением идеи Nix в масштабе всей операционной системы:

NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix, a purely functional package management system. NixOS is an experiment to see if we can build an operating system in which software packages, configuration files, boot scripts and the like are all managed in a purely functional way, that is, they are all built by deterministic functions and they never change after they have been built. Such an operating system should have all the nice characteristics that the Nix package manager has:

* The entire system ? kernel, system services, configuration files, etc. ? is built by a Nix expression in a deterministic and repeatable way.

* Since configuration changes are non-destructive (they don?t overwrite existing files), you can easily roll back to a previous configuration. For instance, the Grub boot menu in NixOS allows the user to boot into any previous system configuration that hasn?t been garbage collected yet. This is very nice if something goes wrong.

* Upgrading a configuration is as safe as installing from scratch, since the realisation of a configuration is not stateful. This is a result of being purely functional.

* Multi-user package management ? any user can install software through the same mechanisms that the administrator uses. This is not the case for most package managers such as RPM.

Furthermore,

NixOS allows us to verify that Nix packages are really pure. Nix prevents undeclared dependencies between packages in the Nix store, but when you run Nix on an existing OS such as SUSE Linux, Nix cannot prevent a build script from (say) calling programs in /bin. If there is no /bin, such a build script will fail.

Требуется доброволец, могущий скачать отсюда два файла, ISO image for i686-linux и желательно тоже nixos-0.1pre10083.tar.bz2. x86_64-linux меня лично не интересует. Я слышал, через Халву это можно дёшево сделать, но я не знаю их правил.