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Introducing GNU Guix

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Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#71

Post by JoeAcchino »

antidoh wrote: post #62
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.

"What's the reason they are reinventing the wheel here?" Maybe they'd eventually like to stop having to say Gnu/ Linux .

As long as they use the Linux kernel they don't have much other naming choiches.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#72

Post by antidoh »

JoeAcchino wrote: post #71
antidoh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What's the reason they are reinventing the wheel here?" Maybe they'd eventually like to stop having to say Gnu/ Linux .

As long as they use the Linux kernel they don't have much other naming choiches.

Until they have their own gkernel.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#73

Post by klrr »

dvdkhlng wrote: post #39
klrr wrote: post #10

What problem does it solve?

Ever tried to build distribution packages? If it works for you, doesn't mean it works everywhere. Slight errors in the dependency specifications of a package may make it fail if you have wrongly versioned/missing libraries etc. It's often very difficult to verify that package dependencies are 100% correct. Sometimes package builds are not reproducable, as autoconf doesn't care about the build dependencies you defined…

Thanks for your information.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#74

Post by klrr »

eyko wrote: post #17
klrr wrote: post #10

What problem does it solve?

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…

Well, I didn't mean to sound like I dislike the idea, hacker value can be as much reason as a problem to code a salvation.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#75

Post by Millennium »

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?

Three words: Not Invented Here.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#76

Post by tedks »

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.

I highly recommend reading over some of the Nix papers -- what the author is doing is totally divergent from nearly every other package manager in a way that's either insane or brilliant (I don't personally know enough to judge). I saw his talk at a software upgrades workshop, and it was pretty impressive.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#77

Post by nwmcsween »

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…

You break the idea of a declarative package by doing this you can have side effects that modify or mess with anything. This means I cannot update a package reliably when it's updated because it may or may not change something.

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#79

Post by rhizome »

benihana wrote: post #52
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.

What relation would you say ego has to scratching one's own itch?

Re: Introducing GNU Guix

#80

Post by Karunamon »

rjbond3rd wrote: post #69
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Because you predict it won't meet your definition of popularity? Once upon a time, Arch and Gentoo were dismissed in exactly this way.

Arch and Gentoo are still tiny fractions of the linux install base (which is itself a tiny fraction of users), and are mostly irrelevant.
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