Re: guix is the guildhall that we always wanted!

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> Crucially, this "guix pack" is really an SDK for Guile and Fibers.
> Fibers is a library.  You can now make an SDK for anything!!!!!!!!!!!  I
> mean, I know, that's a lot of exclamation marks, but check it: you can
> develop locally, say using
>
>   /opt/guile-fibers-1.0.0/bin/guile -L /path/to/my/code
>
> and it just works.  If you package up your code, you can make a Guix
> package out of it and make a "guix pack" out of that closure and
> distribute it to your users: REGARDLESS OF WHAT OPERATING SYSTEM THEY
> RUN, AND WITH FULL SOURCE REPRODUCIBILITY.  It's huge.

IT’S AWESOME!!!!  ;-)

> But while getting your package into guix is easier than you think, it's
> not automatic.  I think there's room for a middle ground that's a bit
> more decentralized than Guix, but more centralized than people using
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH to add random directories of Guix package files.
>
> So!  My proposal for this new "guildhall" would be:
>
>     1. a web service
>
>     2. on which users registers projects
>
>     3. a project is a name + a git repository with a /package.scm file
>
>     4. the package.scm contains Guix package definitions for that project
>
>     5. the web service administers a git repository collecting those
>        packages
>        - without any hydra.gnu.org overhead
>        - without any manual checks
>        - in a form that you can just check out once and add to 
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH
>
>     6. adding a new tag to a project's git repo of the form vX makes a
>        release X and updates the guildhall package
>        - it could be the web service has to poll git repos
>        - or maybe you have to invoke some command to update guildhall
>
>     7. probably we need to steal many ideas from npm.org

So are you suggesting that the new guildhall would provide
Guix-generated packs for those who don’t use Guix, and otherwise regular
Guix packages?

> Open questions would be, what about other targets like macOS or Windows
> or whatever?  There I don't know.  I suspect that if Guix becomes
> popular enough, someone will make a thing whereby you can cross-compile
> to macOS from GNU/Linux at least.  I know you can do that already with
> MinGW.  As for native "guildhall" operation on these targets, I don't
> know.  But I think that is a cost that people will pay for in time.

We could surely create cross-compiled packs for MinGW, though I suspect
a number of packages do not support cross-compilation.

Thanks for starting this thread!

Ludo’.