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Introducing GNU Guix

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Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#51

Post by jmtd »

dhruvbird wrote: post #49
josteink wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why utilize scheme? If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening. Why not scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power. It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full…

Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?

I suspect the fact there's GNU Guile, an entirely in-house Scheme ecosystem, has a lot to do with it. Use Python and be beholden to the Python community (outsiders!) Use JSON (as someone else suggested) and be beholden to the Javascript/JSON community (outsiders! oh and that awful JSON license!) etc.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#52

Post by benihana »

rlpb wrote: post #7

Debian's dpkg and apt are both GPL2+. What's the reason they are reinventing the wheel here? Is there some kind of licence incompatibility that the GNU project cares about? Is there some kind of major architectural difference? Why is it important enough to fragment Free Software developers over? I feel that this should be answered in an FAQ, but I can't find the answer anywhere.

Usually when there is no clear answer to this in a FOSS project, I think it's safe to assume the answer is ego.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#53

Post by fmoralesc »

josteink wrote: post #37
nwmcsween wrote: post #14

It seems everyone reinvents package management poorly again and again. Some things that obviously stand out to me: * Why utilize scheme? It's declaritive utilize a markup like yaml, don't go off the deep end because you can. * Utilize OS specific features such as jails, bind mounts, namespaces, you can have the same NIX style separation without destroying FHS. * Parse the config files for options, it's easy cmake, au…

Why utilize scheme? If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening. Why not scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power. It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full…

> when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening.

Maybe a package manager is not the best place to have that flexibility? (I noticed this seems to support "unprivileged package management", but still...)

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#54

Post by josteink »

dhruvbird wrote: post #49
josteink wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why utilize scheme? If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening. Why not scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power. It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full…

Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?

Not to start a flame-war, but I would argue that Python is not as fully featured as a LISP language-wise.

And as far as LISPs go, Scheme is extremely simplistic and friendly.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#56

Post by morsch »

p9idf wrote: post #38
simonh wrote: post #13

> A distribution built by GNU hackers is a great opportunity to improve consistency and cohesion in GNU! Because the existing fragmentation of GNU package management is too confusing, so we need a new standard for everyone to rally round. [ http://xkcd.com/927/ ]

That particular Xkcd comic has been posted 79 times in the past year or so† and has quickly become a cliché. The authors' stated goals are to make a "purely functional" and "practical 100% free" package manager.†† They don't mention competition, proliferation, or winning market share. A vague hope of consistency and cohesion accompanying the announcement of a program "approaching its first alpha release" isn't a rall…

Hah. Your post made me curious which xkcds are the most popular on HN. This is the top10 (caveat below):

     48 http://xkcd.com/927/
     48 http://xkcd.com/386/
     33 http://xkcd.com/538/
     28 http://xkcd.com/378/
     24 http://xkcd.com/810/
     23 http://xkcd.com/327/
     22 http://xkcd.com/323/
     21 http://xkcd.com/605/
     19 http://xkcd.com/936/
     17 http://xkcd.com/552/
You can easily reproduce the results by using the hnsearch API via

  curl  "http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com&limit=100&start=
and

  grep -ohE "http://xkcd.com/[0-9]*/" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
Unfortunately, I could only process the first 1000 entire list of ~1500 results because the API refused queries with start > 900. I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#57

Post by MatthewPhillips »

rlpb wrote: post #7

Debian's dpkg and apt are both GPL2+. What's the reason they are reinventing the wheel here? Is there some kind of licence incompatibility that the GNU project cares about? Is there some kind of major architectural difference? Why is it important enough to fragment Free Software developers over? I feel that this should be answered in an FAQ, but I can't find the answer anywhere.

Those things are never going to be adopted by Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, or any other non-Debian based distro. That is reason enough not to use it.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#58

Post by rocky1138 »

The Linux community needed this around 15 years ago when Windows 98 came out. Now we've got .deb and .rpm which do the job perfectly well. It's even better nowadays, as well, since their existence is effectively hidden from the user thanks to package managers.

Too little, way too late.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#59

Post by chongli »

laumars wrote: post #29
eyko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it need to? It's for hackers, not for every user. If you're bored and feel like hacking on something, this might interest you. If it doesn't, Mr. Ludovic is not trying to force you to use it. For me, some of its features, specially non-privileged user package management, are interesting. I'm not so much interested in the distribution at the moment, more in the package manager. I imagine there aren't many support…

I principle you are right. However in practice there is a sane point where there are so many competing solutions that you have to question why people don't spend their time improving existing solutions instead of adding to the fragmentation.

Sometimes you can't just improve an existing solution. It may be fundamentally different from what you intend to do (both technically and philosophically).

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#60

Post by rokgarbas »

rocky1138 wrote: post #58

The Linux community needed this around 15 years ago when Windows 98 came out. Now we've got .deb and .rpm which do the job perfectly well. It's even better nowadays, as well, since their existence is effectively hidden from the user thanks to package managers. Too little, way too late.

you can rollback on debian? you can install packages as user on RedHat? i moved away from it just because things like .deb and .rpm don't do the job all the way
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