How many Alpine packages can you install at once? (2024)

I think you can install 100 % of Nix packages at once if you forget to provide a package name to `nix-env -i` (please stop using `nix-env`). [1]

About 3 times more packages than Alpine. [2] RIP!

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[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/308

[2]: https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Reminded of back in '02 or so when the networking spods at $ISP would just install everything off every Red Hat Linux 9 CD when they built a machine so they "didn't have to worry about anything being missing."

Those were the only *n?x boxen at the place that I did my best to avoid touching. It was ... I don't recall that it ever caused a problem (a buggy RH kernel that made fork() only work statistically did once, but that was orthogonal) but it just bothered me as a matter of principle.

In the early days, when the bandwidth of the install CD was vastly higher than that of my internet connection, I routinely clicked "Everything" in the package selection of the RedHat install CD (yes CD, not DVD). Simpler times.

These days when I set up a Linux machine - I don't do in-place updates; an occasional everything-from-scratch restart helps clear out legacy clutter - between the "update" and the packages I actually use (I have a post-install script for my preferred environment), over a gigabyte gets downloaded.

I wonder how large of a container that world create. Sounds like a good exercise for the reader :D

I'm much more interested in how few packages I could install

I love alpine. They make a great base for small and efficient docker containers.

My kind of nerd humor but I read the article only to find that the question I had going into it is not answered: How large might those containers (with/without community) get?

Who's taking the nerd-snipe bait? ;)

How big would it be for Debian?

Dalai Lama walks up to a package manager and said "Make me one with everything"