Autotools formely: a blog post

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

Hi Catano,

Thanks for the blog.

Indeed, I love working with Guix and developing with Guix. Guix takes
care of my deployment and configuration requirements.

I have written some time in the past that with Guix you don't need
autotools. The main thing autotools solve is configuring the build for
an environment. At the same time, with Guix you get a predictable
environment, so a make file (or similar) suffices. It is what I do in
all my development projects - I don't use autotools to develop and
deploy them. It greatly simplifies my existence :). Indeed, I have
never liked autotools (essentially a nasty hack) and only used them
before Nix/Guix. So, my approach is the same as yours :) 

You can do without autotools once inside Guix and once you decide to
ignore targeting other distributions. Which I do, though I have ways
of deploying Guix built packages on other systems without Guix which
people also use. E.g.

  https://github.com/genetics-statistics/GEMMA/releases

The top files include a binary Guix package installer. You can try it.
It is a way of distributing pre-built code on other systems. If you
are interested you could package your stuff too. Though it probably
makes less sense for a library for Guile until it becomes something
accepted by the Guile ecosystem.

Pj.