Re: A registry for distributed sources and binaries

[Jookia]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 01:29:20AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> It's crucially important to the future vitality of this project that we
> retain our freedom to evolve the design of Guix, the way packages are
> specified in Guix, as well as the set of core packages.  These freedoms
> will be drastically curtailed if we support a decentralized system of
> externally-managed repositories.  Therefore, we must not do this.
> 
> What do other people think?
> 
>       Mark

The problem we have is that people want to experiment and have custom versions
of Guix that people can use, with the common intent for coming to a conesnsus
later down the track and eventually have things merged in to upstream, or
perhaps not at all if it's for something like nonfree.

Nobody wants to fork, nobody wants to make enemies. We're all a bit frustrated
with each other at the moment because we have different goals.

I think the clearest system is a way to have multiple guixes installed at once.
Other package managers need not do this, but as long as the daemon compatiblity
is kept it should be fine. There could be a guix-jookia, guix-nonfree for those
that really want to run it on their nonfree systems. These would have their own
internal system with maximum freedom for experimentation. Getting users to
install these systems would be the hard part.

I think it's still worthwhile to remember that this is a political problem with
contributing upstream to Guix, so people are naturally trying to make
downstreams which Guix doesn't support.

Jookia.