Re: Developing libraries for the GNU system with Guix

[sbaugh@catern.com]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> sbaugh@catern.com skribis:
>> - Currently every dependency is located at a well known globally unique
>>   and globally meaningful path; add some kind of "variant package"
>>   construct which specifies a package which is "passed in" to the
>>   environment (maybe by bind-mounting it in a filesystem namespace;
>>   implementation specifics aren't important). To put this in a
>>   programming language sense, one of these packages being present would
>>   turn a Guix distribution from a value into a function.
>
> Not sure I understand.  What do you mean by “passed in to the
> environment”?

I just mean that this would be a path that is not necessarily pointing
to a directory containing the files desired by other packages depending
on it. To make a complete functioning system, the path would need to be
pointed at something containing the right files. (something of the right
type) It could be pointed at different directories in different
filesystem namespaces, and that "pointing" would happen outside the
filesystem namespace when the namespace is created.