Re: Installing Guix easily on other distros

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Thompson, David <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Could we add the .spec, PKGBUILD, and debian files to the Guix
repository?  I know of many projects that include the package manifests
to simplify building packages for major distributions.

An advantage would be that we knew about these files and users wouldn’t
have to search around for the latest package sources.

~~ Ricardo