I love it! Please use it and add a ton of packges.
Because i'm too lazy :)
Introducing GNU Guix
101–110 of 113 posts
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#102Ill stick with apt and yum than you. They've proved themselves enough to me
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#103Debian'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.
The "unprivileged package management" is the important feature here from the GNU point of view. One of the philosophical underpinnings of the GNU project is empowering non-superusers as far as possible - that's why they've stuck with the microkernel design, too. The idea there is that non-superusers would be able to easily run their own filesystem or TCP stack, for example, since it's just a matter of running their own daemon.
Once you understand this, a lot of GNU's technical decisions make more sense.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#104Earlier 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?
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Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not one to declare other people's motivation, but it strikes me as very odd that there isn't a "So, here's what's irreparably wrong with dpkg/apt and rpm/yum".
it's fixing a (real or perceived) problem with nix, not with dpkg or rpm.
Well, there isn't a "So, here's what's wrong with nix" either.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#106The 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.
Ironically, this Guix thing would be perfect... for Windows. Right now, I have to maintain my own list of GnuWin32 installers (wget coreutils cygutils diffutils findutils grep gzip less patch sed tar unzip) retrieved from sf.net, with a 30 lines batch script to deploy them, plus a powershell command to retrieve wget as the first step.
nix (and potentially guix) is working on windows, at least from what i heard. probably there are some issues with existing packages since nobody really pays much attention to windows but if somebody cared this could improved a lot.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#107Debian'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.
with guix/nix you don't even care if they get adopted or not. you can use it in coexistence with any package manager.
very common scenario i come across few times a year: you get to work on an old CentOS/RedHat/Fedora box but you need to install latest package X which is only in next version of current distro. which would mean you need to upgrade or do a lot of manual work. with guix/nix you just install it without need to upgrade.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's fixing a (real or perceived) problem with nix, not with dpkg or rpm.
Well, there isn't a "So, here's what's wrong with nix" either.
there kind of is, if you read between the lines - their usp is the scheme interface, which provides a "proper" programming language with which to interact with the packaging system. they don't explicitly call that out as something wrong with nix, but it's clearly what they feel they do better.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#109The 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
"do the job perfectly well" is a bad way of saying what I was thinking: "for the most part, they work pretty well for the average user" which is true.
They don't cover all edge cases perfectly. But for a user who is new to Linux and wants to install some software, it's better than what we've got on any other OS except ones with dedicated and closed app stores.
Re: Introducing GNU Guix
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?
Packages are mostly just declarations of how you want a package to be built/installed, but sometimes they require additional logic or computation. Using python would require a separate file format to put definitions into (e.g, YAML), and those definitions would need a rigid schema and versioning system. Some existing package managers take this approach, but what happens when you need a feature that doesn't exist in t…
That's actually a great point - something I didn't think of when I suggested python since I don't know scheme :D
Maybe this is reason enough to learn scheme soon.
For practical considerations would you still choose scheme, or would you try and see if some massaging of python can get you the desired results - purely because of the simplicity and adoption rate of the language?