Re: GuixSD and free hardware

[Gammel Holte]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:51 PM, Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> wrote:

Along these lines, it might be interesting if we can get more of the
guix "core" packages in Guix paired down in size.  It's unlikely that
I'm going to be building packages on a neo900 or etc, but I might want
all my small devices in my house to be running Guix, in an ideal world.
I think if I can build the profiles for all my devices and then splat
them across my network, that might be pretty great.  Obviously the "guix
deploy" stuff will help there (sorry, yes, I will be getting to helping
on it soon...) but iirc many of our base packages are pretty large,
mostly because they contain more manuals and etc than needed.

In other words, imagine a future where people really do have many small
"smart devices" (I hate that term, but less bad than "internet of
things", which I have perma-mapped to "internet of someone else's
things" now)... or rather, it's hard to not imagine this situation
growing.  It would be nice if my neo900 and other things could
eventually run Guix, rather than some one-off distro.

I wonder how far off from that world we are?

Sorry if the above was a bit much of a ramble :)

My anecdotal experience is that Guix packages are way lighter than Nix ones. Especially their closures.

Besides, ARM is supported so we should not be that far.

Of course, scaling down to tiny devices might require some really thin custom outputs for a number packages.