this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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You can try out Nix. It can be installed right there on your Kubuntu box, without any conflicts with apt or other package managers.
It's somewhat similar to portage with its ebuilds in that it's source-first and allows you to set up complex dependency trees and configure every package in them. In your case it would allow you to avoid manual rebuilds and just build&install all your custom software with one command from one directory containing some
.nix
files that describe how to fetch, configure and compile every package. (Actually, for your dependencies those files are likely to be in nixpkgs already - you can check at https://search.nixos.org/packages. In that case, you don't have to write any packaging instructions or even build everything, as Nix will intelligently download the binary versions which are helpfully provided by the Nix community).It's quite different from most other package managers/build systems, though, being much "simpler" (it can be described as lambda calculus on files with syntax sugar) but much "harder" (the learning curve is actually a learning wall with the first section requiring mountain climbing experience and covered in barbed wire). If you've been maintaining builds for multiple packages by hand for years, though, it shouldn't be too bad.