> I stumble upon this article about (supposedly) Guix's
> characteristics/advantages:
[...]
> , and was curious about the opinions of the educated Debian people on the
> matter.
I haven't read that article, but here's my opinion:
I would love to see Debian move towards a model like that of NixOS or
Guix. One of the main benefits I see of those systems is that it has
a declarative description of what the system should contain.
Think of it this way: currently, you can more or less figure out which
packages you decided to install on your machine by going through the list
of installed packages and filtering out all those that are marked as
"automatically" installed.
But you can only manipulate this list indirectly, via `apt install` and
`apt remove`.
In contrast, with NixOS/Guix that list is available in a plain text
editable file. And in order to add a package or remove a package you
can edit that list and then say something akin to "make" which will
add/remove the needed packages to bring the system to the state
described in the file.
Another, slightly more subtle, benefit is that you'll always get the
same system state from a given description. In contrast, with Debian,
I have several Debian `testing` machines on which I have installed and
removed over the years the same set of packages, but not exactly in the
same order, and with a different interleaving of `apt upgrade`, and the
result is that they don't all have exactly the same packages installed,
and some suffer from problems that I don't see in the others.
With the NixOS/Guix approach, it's much easier to make sure the systems
are truly identical.
It's not been enough to convince me to switch, but I do wish Debian
would try and take some of those ideas. I think part of it could be
done all within a new APT-like tool without any change to Debian itself
(the part that decides which packages should be installed and removed
based on some text file describing the desired configuration of the
system).
Stefan "happy Debian user since 2003"
