Re: Building Guix

[Pjotr Prins]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 10:22:32PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > It will be a good thing to maintain this Nix package until Guix comes
> > with all the binary installation options that Nix has.
> 
> What do you mean?

What I mean is that for my target audience, bioinformaticians, most
number crunching is on aging Centos-style machines. If Nix is the
easiest route to get Guix going for now I am perfectly happy to
promote that, until Guix has it's own installation binaries as Nix has
(binary tarball, rpm, deb etc.). The Nix binaries, unfortunately, do
require root, which we don't have on all compute clusters, so I still
end up building that from source.

Best thing is to have Guix part of the distro, for sure. Second best
thing is to an easy build from source (which not the case now, I just
spent a day on a Guix Centos build and still not there, I did succeed
in building Nix, but maybe it is me).

> I think there are a couple of distros for which Guix packages exists
> (Arch and openSUSE, perhaps Gentoo, IIRC.)

Cool! OpenSuSE will help my case, as people use it on their desktops.
Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora and Centos missing.  Representing the
majority of systems (Android not counting). But, yeah, it will come.
It will take a few years to reach all users though.  'Stable' cycles
with Debian and Centos take a long time.  

Cluster installations can easily be 4 years old. And then enlightened
administrators need to install guix. It would be great to replace the
existing 'module' system. I can't wait :)

Pj.