Hi Brandon, Brandon Invergo <[email protected]> skribis:
>> I am pleased to announce GNU Guix, an on-going project to build a >> functional package manager and associated free software distribution of >> the GNU system. > > Congrats on the release! Note that it’s not a release yet, but you can help make it happen faster! :-) > As previously promised, I do intend to write a script to convert GSRC > build scripts to Guix scripts. That would be neat. Currently I use ‘guix-import’ to convert simple recipes from Nixpkgs, which I had often written before in Nix language. > Anyway, the point is that I'll soon be in a proper position to start > converting them. I'll let you know. Future development will be on > Savannah now instead of Gitorious, right? Well, we use a DVCS ;-), but the main repo will be on Savannah, yes. > * Guix: a functional package manager, can form the basis of a distribution > * GSRC: a collection of BSD Ports-like build scripts for GNU software, > not intended as a distribution but rather as a supplement to a > distribution's own software collection. Has some light package > management features (no db but keeps track of what is installed in > per-package text files) > * Sourceinstall: simplifies the process of installing software from a > source tarball if the package follows the standard GNU build/install > procedure. Has some package management features (db of installed > packages, but does not handle the fetching of the tarball from an > online source). I think its dependence on the GNU standard makes it > too inflexible to be the foundation of a distro as is, but I don't > know that for sure. Documentation is scarce. > * Swbis: I'm not totally clear on this one but it implements some POSIX > software packaging and distributed installation standard. To be > honest, its use is not very clear from the documentation unless you > already know what it is supposed to do. Can anyone explain it better? There’s also GNU Stow. There’s definitely a fair amount of overlap here, and I’m guilty for adding some more. Now, experience with Nixpkgs/NixOS has convinced me that this approach allows us to go way beyond transitional package management techniques. > What about Sourceinstall? I see a lot of overlap with the GSRC use cases > as it is now. What I would be interested in seeing is if > libsourceinstall can be adapted to use Guix and/or GSRC build scripts, > so that the user can have a Gtk-based GUI for installing packages. Can > the Sourceinstall maintainer, if he's reading this, clarify if that's > possible? That’d be neat. Another thing I’d love to have is a package.el back-end for Guix. Thanks, Ludo’.
