Re: Scope of support for Guix on other distros

[Ludovic Courtès]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ricardo Wurmus writes:
>
>> Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Since these don't provide Guix in the main repo (and Debian won't
>>> because we violate the FHS with /gnu/) we could probably auto-generate
>>> the .deb or .rpm from some gexp?
>>
>> I was thinking about adding support for the “deb” package format to
>> “guix pack”.  We can already create fat tarballs, so it shouldn’t be too
>> much effort to create fat Debian archives.
>
> I think this would be a huge win!

Indeed!  .deb is quite simple:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_%28file_format%29>.

It wouldn’t be optimal in that the generated package would be
self-contained: it would bring its own Guile, libgc, etc. instead of
using those of the host distro.  But it does mean that it would work
pretty well.  :-)

Another option would be to make a derivation that runs Checkinstall in a
Debian VM, which would provide a package that’s better integrated with
Debian, but it’s more tedious.

Ludo’.