Honestly, at first I wasn't too surprised by this, but as I thought about it some more, it's actually pretty damned impressive. Boiling it down a bit, would it be fair to call this a "more universal AUR/yaourt"?
The approach of Bedrock Linux is very interesting. It makes use of Linux-specific features like bind mounts and tries to unify several linux distributions into one meta-distribution, which gives the framework for the multi-distribution operations. They could also use namespaces for a more strict separation of clients, but that's a detail.<p>The idea to move completely to musl is a little bit utopistic, because musl libc is in a very early phase if you want to compile any piece of software of the base system with it. It's mostly C99/C11 and POSIX compilant, but there are several GNU-specific libraries missing, and in a world which uses GNU userland on Linux it's not simple to overcome that limitation.<p>The mentioned /etc problem seems to be the same problem as solved by ip-netns(8). Take a look at the source if you need further information, it's based on other bind mounts.<p>But I don't think Bedrock Linux is the next-generation approach for Linux distributions, or rather software distributions in general, though they don't claim that. I'm working on my own Linux distribution since about a year and it's based completely on a ports tree, as known from FreeBSD, but with a simpler code base and simpler Makefiles. At the moment, I'm trying to create a stable commit, which will build without issues in several configurations, but that's hard work, especially because Linux or rather the Linux userland is mostly a ghetto™ (you won't get information about much low-level software).<p>But I think, as you should noticed, that Bedrock Linux has a right to exist, but it won't be the next-generation approach.
This is very exciting.<p>I cannot count the times that I've wanted this "one specific program" which isn't available in my distro's repo, which also depends on a version of a library that is also not available in my distro's repo. Will definitely take a look at this.<p>Kudos.
"a rock-solid stable base yet still have easy access to cutting-edge packages ..."
This sounds really nice in theory and I hope they can pull it of, but I can't see how that can work.
Tell me this though. Someone who will install Bedrock Linux is most likely a more advanced linux user. Would they not just compile from source instead of installing this disto? Should I install a whole different distro just to get pre-packaged software? I think not.
I just remembered what else this reminded me of: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_%28Unix%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_%28Unix%29</a>
This strikes me as a terrible hack. Yes, I've run into all of the problems this is trying to solve, but if this is what is necessary to fix them, I rather build my packages from source (or use *BSD and ports/pkgsrc).