Re: Guix Front End (GUI) and making it more mainstream, popular in scientific community.

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

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Hello everyone,

On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 21:55:10 +0530
Aniket Patil <aniket112.patil@gmail.com> wrote:

>If we build a GUI frontend then we can attract more
> people who don't identify themselves with CLI users. As such there are many
> people like writers, Graphic Designers, General users, etc. who don't
> bother about CLI, will love to see such a package manager.  And considering
> the fact GUIX lets rollback to the previous version of the package it will
> be very helpful in the scientific community, to maintain and work with
> different versions of packages.

I've got one at https://gitlab.com/daym/guix-gui/ .

As of commit 978f7d92b4486829fd4f5030baf2d42c001b0890 (current master),
guix-gui works well enough that you can see the current profile, you have
(slow) tooltips, you can type to search, you can view the previous generation,
and you can get a list of all installable packages in Guix.

Not much more works yet because I've hit this (design) bug in Guix and/or GNOME:

* https://github.com/spk121/guile-gi/issues/96

I hadn't noticed before just how bad a match Guix's private dependencies (which
I think are a good thing) and GNOME's object system is (see link above).

> P.S: I don't know whether GUI for Guix exists or not, to my knowledge it
> doesn't. If I am mistaken please enlighten me on this topic.

It does kinda exist--but working on GUIs in Guile is like pulling teeth.

I'm used to seamless integration like PyGTK is in Python--PyGTK feels
EXACTLY like a native Python library.  You can't tell that it's implemented
in C at all.

The way it is in Guile is not seamless.  Furthermore, there are fundamental
problems in how the package "gobject-introspection" is designed (see link
above)--so I can't see how this can be resilient or consistent at all.

(Also, I've used Delphi before--that's basically the holy grail of GUI
development.  That doesn't help making me less grumpy using this contraption
string-and-duct-tape barely-holding-together contraption instead)

In any case, with all the involuntary yak-shaving I have to do it's gonna
take a while.

Or I could just use Gtk in C and use popen("guix ...").

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