Re: Thoughts and questions from a newcomer

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Andrew Erlanger <andrew.erlanger@gmail.com> skribis:

> My main draw to Guix was my frustration with configuring Gentoo and
> other distros. After I spend a day exactly configuring a system, I want
> the state which I set up to be _exactly_ reproducible anytime I want.
> But clearly I don't need all the information of the entire disk image
> to reproduce that exact state; I just need a few configuration files
> worth of information.

Indeed.  Like Julien wrote, if you’re using GuixSD, having the Guix
commit and the GuixSD configuration file is all you need to reproduce
the exact same deployment, bit-for-bit (or almost).

To get a feel of what configuration looks like in GuixSD, take a look
at this section of the manual:

  https://gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html

> On the other hand, it seems that Guix might be more about mitigating
> side-effects rather than declaring state. So, which is it?

GuixSD, as can be seen on the page above, is purely declarative.  You
declare an OS, and then you instantiate it with ‘guix system’.

The per-user profiles of Guix can be either declarative (via ‘guix
package --manifest’), or with an imperative style (‘guix package
--install’ etc.).  In the latter case, the style is imperative, but
under the hood it’s always declarative.

HTH,
Ludo’.