Re: Installing Guix easily on other distros

[Thompson, David]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Ricardo Wurmus
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 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.

That sounds like a good idea.  I would welcome patches for such things.

- Dave