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A comment on Crom – A package manager without the package registry. Parent comment

Re:Crom – A package manager without the package registry by mbostock on Monday January 25, 2016 @07:52PM (#10971214)
How does Nix find packages? E.g., how does `nix-env --install firefox` get mapped to a specific package?
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Re:Crom – A package manager without the package registry by k__ on Monday January 25, 2016 @08:11PM (#10971274)
As far as I know there are channels with nix-expressions (which are the package definitions), which are descriptions of how gather the source-code or binaries from specific URLs.

npm2nix for example only uses npm to gather the the packages from the registry, but uses Nix for all the other stuff. [0]

[0]: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.de/2014/10/deploying-npm-pa...

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Re:Crom – A package manager without the package registry by mbostock on Monday January 25, 2016 @08:27PM (#10971323)
It’s hard to tell how much overlap there is.

One of way of looking at Crom is that it provides a more convenient interface than a URL, yet without the centralization that comes from using names in a registry.

Crom helps you go from a name to a URL (via search heuristics), but it’s the URL that ultimately serves as the identifier. So, if you author a package.json with a name like “d3-format”, that gets expanded to a full URL, perhaps with interactive confirmation. (Or not, because it’s trivial to undo and redo.)

Also, unlike a URL to the ZIP file directly, a package URL in Crom supports semantic versioning: it refers to all versions of a project, and thus you can upgrade or specify a desired version range.

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