Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com>]

Hello David,

I am huge fan of Guix on WSL2 and I used to use it a lot 😄.  And yes, it should be documented well (or even better, the installation should be made super simple) while as you mentioned, it might be easier to do this in another community.

I don't share the ideology of hardline rejection of the use of proprietary software - I just need everything to be accountable, such as knowing which part of the system is Free and which isn't. (and of course more Free the merrier)

Guix, the software, (IMHO, not necessarily the community unless a separate one is created) does the most perfect job for this 😄

-Yasu


> On Mar 19, 2022, at 06:14, david larsson <david.larsson@selfhosted.xyz> wrote:
> 
> On 2022-03-17 13:56, zimoun wrote:
>> Hi Olivier,
>>> On another note, what I find fascinating is why Guix and Nix are not
>>> more used in academic papers.
>> Indeed.
>> One part of the answer is, IMHO: it is difficult to spread the word.
>> For instance, with co-authors, we have tried to write a short paper
>> detailing what Guix solves, i.e., the computational environment part of
>> the “science crisis“, and targeting especially bioinfo folks.  We got
>> many refusals by the journals that bioinfo folks indeed read and we end
>> in a “specialized” journal.
>> On the top of that, add the fact that most of the time, people use what
>> other people in their lab or collaborators already use.
>> On the top of that, add the fact that the story of Guix on Windows or
>> Mac is not really good.  I am not arguing here, just to mention that
>> many people are still using Windows or Mac and few one Linux variant.
>> Therefore, all in all, the bootstrap of Guix is hard; as always. :-)
>> The initiative Guix-HPC is an attempt to address that.  The name is
>> probably not fully representative since now it looks like Guix in
>> scientific context; HPC being only one component.
>> From my point of view, the bootstrap of Guix in scientific world
>> requires more documentation materials for many common use cases and more
>> popular applications or usual scientific stack.  For instance PyTorch in
>> Guix is one step but many things are still really hard to do with Guix
>> when it is not elsewhere.  Another instance is RStudio for bioinfo folks
>> – it does not work out of the box with Guix when it does elsewhere.
>> Help in these both areas – howto materials and popular applications – is
>> very welcome. :-)
>> Join the fun, join guix-science@gnu.org :-)
>> Cheers,
>> simon
> 
> I run Guix including GUI applications from Windows via WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). It may help some to try it out if this setup was easier and more documented, though I suppose that is somewhat prevented to go via official channels by the FSDG guidelines.
> 
> Best regards,
> David
>