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You're conflating S-expressions and the DSL. Your attempt to set up "ideologically driven" as an obstacle to "general purpose" is baffling, because we've gone

by rekado 4y ago

You're conflating S-expressions and the DSL. Your attempt to set up "ideologically driven" as an obstacle to "general purpose" is baffling, because we've gone out of our way to make extending Guix close to trivial: via channels, through package transformations, by augmenting the Guile load path to load any modules you might have (with "-L", "GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH", or even just the Guile load path variables).

pxc 4y ago
Casting Guix as uniquely 'ideologically driven' is also silly. Ideology runs through the communities and development processes of all kinds of tools, including possible alternatives to Guix, like Nix. You can find many Nixpkgs PRs where reviewers are concerned with 'purity' in a technical sense, which is absolutely ideological even when it addresses really important concerns. And similarly, Nix doesn't let you install non-free software by default, even though it includes the build recipes in Nixpkgs. Software freedom is important (surprise, surprise) to many free software developers, not just contributors to Guix or other GNU projects. Guix should not be overlooked because of the project's political commitments. It's absolutely general-purpose software which can be used flexibly. It's not directly related to this exact thread but I want to address the macOS question from a Nix perspective, since it has come up on this post and often comes up on others. macOS breaks Nix all the time, almost on every major OS update. It is a lot of work to keep things working nicely on macOS, and even though Nix's macOS support is really good, it's not as good as the Linux support. While I think that makes Nix accessible to many users in a way that is great, it's totally understandable that Guix currently faces a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of developer interest in supporting macOS— if you don't already use, know, and like macOS, trying to port Guix to it and maintain that support seems daunting and pretty unattractive. I wouldn't want to be responsible for supporting either package manager on macOS. And I don't think that has anything to do with 'extreme' developer ideology! It's just about the ordinary problem of developer interest and volunteer projects.

by rekado 4y ago

pxc 4y ago

Casting Guix as uniquely 'ideologically driven' is also silly. Ideology runs through the communities and development processes of all kinds of tools, including possible alternatives to Guix, like Nix. You can find many Nixpkgs PRs where reviewers are concerned with 'purity' in a technical sense, which is absolutely ideological even when it addresses really important concerns. And similarly, Nix doesn't let you install non-free software by default, even though it includes the build recipes in Nixpkgs. Software freedom is important (surprise, surprise) to many free software developers, not just contributors to Guix or other GNU projects. Guix should not be overlooked because of the project's political commitments. It's absolutely general-purpose software which can be used flexibly. It's not directly related to this exact thread but I want to address the macOS question from a Nix perspective, since it has come up on this post and often comes up on others. macOS breaks Nix all the time, almost on every major OS update. It is a lot of work to keep things working nicely on macOS, and even though Nix's macOS support is really good, it's not as good as the Linux support. While I think that makes Nix accessible to many users in a way that is great, it's totally understandable that Guix currently faces a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of developer interest in supporting macOS— if you don't already use, know, and like macOS, trying to port Guix to it and maintain that support seems daunting and pretty unattractive. I wouldn't want to be responsible for supporting either package manager on macOS. And I don't think that has anything to do with 'extreme' developer ideology! It's just about the ordinary problem of developer interest and volunteer projects.