Re: GSoC ideas

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Tomáš Čech writes:

> On Sat, Feb 06, 2016 at 10:54:34AM -0800, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
>>Maybe we should have a place to collect ideas?
>>
>>Anyway, here would be my top items for GSoC:
>>
>> - An installer wizard (written in Guile of course!)
>> - g-expressions which generate packages of the Guix package manager for
>>   .deb and .rpm based distros, and work to get those upstream in Debian
>>   and Fedora
>
> What would be purpose of that? Do you plan to use some other store path so it
> won't collide with Guix maintained installation on the same machine?
>
> OTOH it may be interesting to generate only (in my case) RPM metadata
> so native system's package manager can track Guix generated files and
> use pre/post install scripts for interactions with Guix (to
> install/remove/protect them). That would glue Guix to system even
> better. Just wild idea when thinking about your idea...
>
> S_W

Sorry, I was unclear.  What I'm talking about is Guix *as a package
manager* to be able to be available on foreigh distros so I can
encourage friends to do:

  apt-get install guix

... and then do user-space hacking with Guix, and use "guix environment"
for hacking on my projects...  I think we'd increase our userbase
dramatically by getting Guix as a user-space pacakge manager into
various distros.

The gexp part was because of the gexp that (iirc) generates the "tarball
install" method of things as inspiration... could we build something
similar that builds a .deb or .rpm of Guix as an install method?

 - Chris