Re: Guix on macOS

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Hi Chris,
>
> Chris Marusich <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I want to get Guix working on macOS.  I recently had a need to do this,
>> and I was sad to find that although Nix works on macOS, Guix isn't quite
>> there yet.  The manual makes it sound like this should be fairly
>> straightforward, and I intend to give it a shot [1].  But before I
>> begin, I wanted to know: has anyone done this already?  Is there
>> interest?  I've checked the email lists, and I didn't find much
>> discussion about this.
>
> First of all, it’s never been a goal of Guix to run on non-GNU systems.
> Now, I have nothing against it in principle, as long as (1) this can be
> achieved in a maintainable way, and (2) the targeted user-land software
> is free and buildable from source.
>
> I suspect macOS fails criterion #2.  Back in the day (not sure if that’s
> still the case), Nix would bootstrap using the system’s compiler and C
> library (which meant that things were likely to break in subtle ways on
> macOS upgrades.)
>
> As for criterion #1, to me, that pretty much means sticking to the GNU
> libc.  From my experience on Nixpkgs, having to deal with different C
> libraries is a real burden.  It also leads to a situation where you have
> second-class systems because they use an alternate libc and it’s not
> uncommon for packages to fail to build against that libc.  To put it
> differently: it’s already difficult enough to have *one* OS working.
>
> I’m afraid this is not the answer you were looking for.  WDYT?
>
> Ludo’.

Is there a way to maybe run Guix in some sort of namespaced or some
variant of "virtualized" or "contained" way that we could recommend for
OSX users, without having to bend over backwards to accomodate a
different libc and etc?

 - Chris