Re: Guix as a Guile package manager

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org> writes:

> The way I see it:
>
> * Guile ships with guile-guix (a library that implements much of Guix'
>   package management capabilities, but not the Guix program) and a
>   (very small) Guile package manager which depends on guile-guix

The package management capabilities provided by Guix only make sense in
the world of functional package management where the complete graph of
dependencies is captured, all the way down to bootstrap libraries.

If you take away functional package management (e.g. because it’s
inconvenient in a simple language-specific package manager), you won’t
need the guix-daemon anymore, nor do you need to talk to it anymore, nor
do you need to actually be able to represent the complete graph of
inputs ... and you end up throwing away pretty much everything that Guix
provides.

> * Guix is distributed separately as a (very small) program which
>   depends on guile-guix

The commands provided by Guix are tiny Guile scripts that use the bulk
of Guix as a library.  In a sense “guile-guix” already exists: it’s
called Guix :)  But it’s the wrong library for a language-specific
package manager.

~~ Ricardo