What I’m Working On

Currently, I’ve decided to delve into package managers and trying to take the politics away from what is considered a pretty beloved way of doing package management… Nix. From my first post you could more than likely see that I’m not super fond of the state of some OSS projects that decided to inject politics into their community and made the discourse about the political environment that they’re working in, rather than the technology.

My belief is that OSS should be, at least to some extent, all about the technology that the community loves and is contributing to together. That’s why I’ve decided that I’m going to attempt (and hopefully succeed) in making a package manager that is generally easier to use than Nix, with the same goals of reproducible builds and being deterministic in nature.

The parent of the “product” is called Invara and can be found at Invara. Ultimately, under this branding, Invara will release open source tooling associated with whatever technology that (currently) I or the community would like to see as long as it’s within my technical boundaries. Otherwise, if I feel it’s a good decision and there is enough of a community built around Invara, a maintainer or “core” contributor can feel free to take the project on if it’s outside of my purview. Either way, the goal at the end of the day for Invara is to build tooling for people that are doing all types of work with as little friction as possible, and continue to have technology at the forefront.

Introducing drin

drin is my take on what a package manager should be, and what the community around an OSS package manager should be. As of right now, I can’t point you to documentation or packages, but I can point you to drin just to check things out. Some notes:

The above links will be where all of the resources for the community will live and be able to interact with the drin ecosystem. There will be installation instructions that will be pushed at Installation whenever the alpha version is ready.

Timeline

Because it’s a solo project as of right now, and it’s not very far along, the expected timeline is a bit shady. I’d personally like to target some time in 2026 for at least basic functionality. Application support will come first, and following that language support will come next. I will target languages that I use first (mostly functional) and then continue with other languages on a case by case basis!

Thanks For Reading

If you’ve made it through this entire post, I just want to say thanks and I appreciate it! If you’re looking to work with me at any point, feel free to open an issue and see how you can get involved via github. All the tech is very early and for drin core doesn’t even have a single loc written yet, so you’d be helping set some guidelines and working towards the future of this with me. Thanks again!