Re: Update on distro bootstrapping with Guix

[Simon Josefsson]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Actually, each user as a forest of symlinks under ~/.nix-profile
> pointing to packages installed by the user.
>
> So in the above example, you would typically have $HOME/.nix-profile/lib
> in $LIBRARY_PATH, and you would link against libfoo from there, and the
> resulting binary would have a RUNPATH pointing to
> $HOME/.nix-profile/lib/libfoo.so.

Ah.  And the forrest of symlinks can be automatically upgraded following
some "stable" branch or similar?

>>> Yeah.  I find support for parallel installations, complete dependency
>>> descriptions, per-user installations, atomic upgrades and rollback, and
>>> so on pretty compelling [0].  It’s a huge technical gap IMO.
>>
>> Right, it is revolutionary, and there is some disadvantages with that
>> since it requires that everything adapt to the new model.  Minimizing
>> those costs will make it appear evolutionary and more people might
>> switch...
>
> Yes, but there’s no free lunch, if I may.  ;-)
>
> The Mancoosi EU FP research project has tried to work toward providing
> some of these features on top of “regular” distros in its WP3 [0].  A
> deliverable from May 2011 [1] mentions modified APT and RPM versions
> supporting transactional upgrades and rollback, but I haven’t found
> traces of production code or such.

Agreed.  I suspect the apetite for these features is low in the
Debian/Ubuntu world.  Something need to trigger interest, and Guix might
be it.

/Simon