You don't need to upgrade everything just to upgrade a single package. With traditional GNU+Linux distributions this isn't always quite true, because it's hard to install different variants side-by-side.
With functional package management every application and library gets its own namespace. Installing something is a matter of picking individual items from their own namespaces and creating a profile, the union of all outputs of all packages that are to be installed.
This makes it possible for users to install not only different major versions for selected applications but even variants of the same package (e.g. different configuration flags or different compiler).
At the bioinformatics institute we are using this to provide scientific software to cluster users. With Guix, users can create custom variants with very little effort without affecting the system state or other people's software profiles.
There is still a lot that can be done by improving package management systems. Giving up by going the route of appification (like it's done with Snappy or when Docker is abused as a packaging tool) is a bad choice, in my opinion.
With functional package management every application and library gets its own namespace. Installing something is a matter of picking individual items from their own namespaces and creating a profile, the union of all outputs of all packages that are to be installed.
This makes it possible for users to install not only different major versions for selected applications but even variants of the same package (e.g. different configuration flags or different compiler).
At the bioinformatics institute we are using this to provide scientific software to cluster users. With Guix, users can create custom variants with very little effort without affecting the system state or other people's software profiles.
There is still a lot that can be done by improving package management systems. Giving up by going the route of appification (like it's done with Snappy or when Docker is abused as a packaging tool) is a bad choice, in my opinion.