Re: Installing Guix easily on other distros

[Thompson, David]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Hartmut Goebel
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> today on irc, there was discussion about that Guix should be easily
> installable and manageable in other distros being higher priority. This
> could attract more users to ry out Guix. So I created a draft .spec-file
> for building and installing Guix o RPM-based systems like Fedora.
>
> Maybe someone using Fedora may want to add a package request in their
> bug-tracker. I already did for Mageia.

This has come up several times, and I agree that we should provide
packages for popular GNU/Linux distributions.  However, Guix *cannot*
be made available in many distros official repositories (most notably
Debian and Fedora) because Guix violates their policies, such as:

- Software must conform to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(violation: Guix introduces the /gnu directory)
- Software must be bootstrapped from source (violation: Guix requires
a set of bootstrap binaries that *cannot* be replaced by the distro
without changing the hashes of every package, effectively preventing
them from receiving binaries from hydra.gnu.org)

Guix is at odds with other distros because it is a distro itself.  So,
I think what would be best is for users of these distros to host Guix
packages in popular places for third-party packages, like Arch's AUR
or Fedora's COPR:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/guix/
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lantw44/guix/

What would be even better is if people *told us* when they made a
package.  I learned about these indirectly, long after they were
originally available.

Hope this helps,

- Dave