Package management
The art of building and distributing software packages
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Package management is the art of building and distributing software packages.
Nix is different from package managers like apt, dpkg, and yum in several important ways:
- Nix always builds all packages from scratch, including the entire closure, or dependency tree, of that package. But if a dependency is already present in the Nix store or in a remote cache, Nix can use that instead of rebuilding it, which means that Nix can provide incremental builds.
- Nix has a language—also called Nix—that you can use to define your own package builds
- Nix works on several platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows WSL.