Re: Guix as a Guile package manager

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Many of us in the Guile community, including myself, are not very
> interested in language-specific package managers because they are
> problematic:
>
> - They put burden on the user to make sure the right toolchain is
>   available to build/install things (GCC and co.)
>
> - They cannot describe the full dependency graph for things that
>   aren't completely written in that language or use a foreign-function
>   interface (for example, a Guile library that talks to a C library
>   via the dynamic FFI, or one that uses the Guile C API)
>
> - They encourage new users to conflate the build system with the
>   package manager, leading to software that cannot be built without a
>   network connection and a specific package manager.  Java software is
>   notorious for this, as are Ruby and Python to a lesser degree.
>
> That said, I see the desire to have a tool for easily sharing pure
> Guile modules.

To complement this, I would say that, despite these limitations, there’s
probably room for Guildhall because it addresses the needs of
non-GNU/Linux users and GNU/Linux users who cannot run Guix for some
reason.

That said, we already have a number of Guile packages in Guix, and I
would love to see more of them.  The fact that Guix can make it easy to
work not only with pure Scheme libraries but also with things like the
Guile-GNOME stack makes it a very good option.

Thanks,
Ludo’.