>It's a shame it can't use all of PyPI though. People often have this disappointment about Guix not being some sort of meta-package manager that can use any pa

>It's a shame it can't use all of PyPI though. People often have this disappointment about Guix not being some sort of meta-package manager that can use any package format right off-the-shelf, which I think is caused by a misunderstanding of how the system works. Guix packages describe the precise dependency graph of any piece of software, all the way down to the C compiler's compiler. A package on PyPI, or anywhere else for that matter, does not. For example, Python eggs that build native extensions need certain shared libraries and C header files available on the system before they can be installed, but PyPI has no way of installing those things or otherwise capturing that information in a precise way. However, us Guix devs can, and should, make it easy for users to take the metadata for a package available in another system such as PyPI and produce, to the best of our ability, a Scheme snippet that gets one most of the way to a working Guix package. We wrote the 'guix import' utility for this purpose. Right now, it can generate Scheme snippets based on packages at PyPI, CPAN, Hackage, ELPA, RubyGems, and CRAN. The user can take the output of the importer, and add the (hopefully few) missing pieces, such as the C library a Python native extension needs.