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Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

guix.gnu.org

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Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#71

Post by craftyguy »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #62
e12e wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just wanted to download and run a binary (or jar) - you can still do that? While freedom zero (the most important!) is the ability "to use the software" - being able to improve, patch and adapt the software is also very important!

> If you just wanted to download and run a binary (or jar) - you can still do that? If it were that simple, why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.

> If it were that simple,

It is that simple.

> why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.

Because there's a huge difference between a user downloading/running a binary, and software package management in an OS. The former is not maintainable, your binaries will be out of date soon, etc. But, if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#72

Post by bitwize »

tom_mellior wrote: post #56
sterlind wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is Coq, the interactive theorem prover. I quite like the name (and the logo, which is a rooster.)

Legend has it that Gérard Huet, who named Coq, enjoys double entendre and chose the name deliberately, just like he did with the Zipper data structure. So this might not be a great example of something that accidentally has a double meaning.

Apparently some British researchers were working on a theorem prover named Bit, which in French sounds like "bitte" (slang for penis). So the French researchers who worked on Coq cheekily chose a French word with a double-entendre meaning in English.

But all these anecdotes counteract what Wikipedia says, which is that Coq was named for one of its authors, Thierry Coquand, and for his "calculus of constructions" (CoC).

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#73

Post by bitwize »

jessaustin wrote: post #64
blahbhthrow3748 wrote: post #6

This is extremely neat but the name "gash" is... a poor choice. Gory in standard English, worse as a slang term

I'd thank you for not making HN a worse place by bikeshedding. You may not care about this project, but some people here do.

It's not bikeshedding. The open source community has opened its eyes to how poor a job of inclusivity it's done, and one of the changes that resulted was a social taboo against names and terminology that serve as microaggressions, including "master", "slave", "blacklist", "cop", and "gimp". Given the context in which "gash" is often used in ordinary language, it's reasonable to at least question its use as a project name.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#74

Post by lazyjones »

blahbhthrow3748 wrote: post #6

This is extremely neat but the name "gash" is... a poor choice. Gory in standard English, worse as a slang term

It's amazing that in 2020 people still use relatively common English words to name their software. Apart from all the confusion (context needed to understand what is being meant) and issues such as those you mentioned, the projects will be hard to google, risk collisions with other projects, have domain and trademark conflicts etc. ... Just make up artificial words, concatenate several terms etc. people. Though in this particular case, conventions like "has to end with 'sh' because ... cargo cult" and "must be easy to type" probably played a role.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#75

Post by jbboehr »

rekado wrote: post #43
mason55 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a basic Nix user so I can't speak to much, but my understanding is that one of the major difference is Guix uses Scheme (or a Scheme-like language) for config so it's more familiar. Nix uses their own language, also called Nix. On the other hand I believe the package repo for Nix is much more comprehensive and kept more up to date.

> On the other hand I believe the package repo for Nix is much more comprehensive and kept more up to date. What makes you say so? (disclaimer: I'm a contributor to Guix and just upgraded several hundred R packages.)

When I was deciding between Nix and Guix, perhaps 5 years ago, I definitely got the impression that Nix had more contributors and the more comprehensive package set, which is one reason why I ultimately decided on NixOS. I couldn't say which was more up-to-date, but, well, anything not up-to-date is an excuse for me to contribute :)

That being said, at the time I had wanted to choose Guix over Nix. The channels seemed a bit better thought-out and grafts sounded like a good idea.

Not having a lisp background though, it was just easier for me to get into Nix.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#76

Post by civodul »

jhoechtl wrote: post #70
rudolph9 wrote: post #15

Does anyone know of a recent comparison of NixOS vs Guix? Both these projects are awesome and I’m a NixOS user but I want to learn more about Guix. I’ve found older ones but nothing in the past year and with all the recent developments in both communities I’d love to see a side by side comparison.

Guile seems to have made some substantial improvements too. Has there been made any performance comparisons between the Racket VM and Guile?

There are benchmarks at https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/ but unfortunately they lack data for Guile 3.0. There's a Guile 2.2/3.0 comparison at https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-releas... .

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#77

Post by ImprobableTruth »

bitwize wrote: post #72
tom_mellior wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legend has it that Gérard Huet, who named Coq, enjoys double entendre and chose the name deliberately, just like he did with the Zipper data structure. So this might not be a great example of something that accidentally has a double meaning.

Apparently some British researchers were working on a theorem prover named Bit, which in French sounds like "bitte" (slang for penis). So the French researchers who worked on Coq cheekily chose a French word with a double-entendre meaning in English. But all these anecdotes counteract what Wikipedia says, which is that Coq was named for one of its authors, Thierry Coquand, and for his "calculus of constructions" (CoC…

>But all these anecdotes counteract what Wikipedia says, which is that Coq was named for one of its authors, Thierry Coquand, and for his "calculus of constructions" (CoC).

It being named after Coquand is unsourced and even states something that is outright wrong (Coquand is not Coq's "principal author", the best fit would be Huet and Christine Paulin, but even then it was developed by a team, they just lead it. Source: Coq's history page).

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#78

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

craftyguy wrote: post #71
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you just wanted to download and run a binary (or jar) - you can still do that? If it were that simple, why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.

> If it were that simple, It is that simple. > why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult. Because there's a huge difference between a user downloading/running a binary, and software package management in an OS. The former is not maintainable, your binaries will be out of date soon…

> if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun.

I really do want to do this, precisely because the software in the repo is often out of date, if it is even there at all! I really don't like the idea of a mandatory middleman between the developer and the user.

And since I really do want to do this, and do it often, I can say with quite a bit of certainty that

> It is that simple.

Is complete and utter bullshit! Sometimes you get lucky and the developer produces AppImages or a static binary, sometimes you're less lucky and have to grab the binary and its dependencies and write a startup script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH, sometimes you're even less lucky than that and get to use patchelf to force it to use a compatible ld.so, but most of the time you end up having to compile the damn thing from source like it is 1975.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#79

Post by Quiark »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #78
craftyguy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it were that simple, It is that simple. > why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult. Because there's a huge difference between a user downloading/running a binary, and software package management in an OS. The former is not maintainable, your binaries will be out of date soon…

> if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun. I really do want to do this, precisely because the software in the repo is often out of date, if it is even there at all! I really don't like the idea of a mandatory middleman between the developer and the user. And since I really do want to do this, and do it often, I can say with quite a bit of certainty that >…

Oh wow that sounds exactly like the kind of problems package mamagers solve. Your complaint basically boils down to - nobody prepared a one click package of latest version for free for me.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#80

Post by matthewbauer »

qqii wrote: post #44
artistsvoid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear it being 'GNU' they will shoot themselves in the foot somehow. Bad marketing, unnecessarily geeky and childish nomenclature, GPLv3 and make it all free software, no proprietary drivers, hard to get proprietary third party software to install et cetera... 'GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom.'[0] NixOS is developed using the MIT l…

I guess it depends on what you mean by shoot themselves in the foot. There are major differences in philosophy and bar the "superficial" differences these are quite different projects. For one nix simply doesn't have a project focused on bootstrapping. As another example compare rust bootstrapping[0] versus using a rust binary[1]. Nix also has no alternative to guix challenge[2] or guix pack[3]. Even a comparison of…

Nix has `nix build --check` which should do the same thing as `guix challenge`. I think there may be more fine tuned options in challenge though.
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