Re: You say nix, I say guix: Nix 2.0 and Guix

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> skribis:

> On February 22nd, Nix 2.0 was released:
>
> https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-relnotes-2.0

Very nice work.  It looks like the CLI is closer to that of Guix now.  :-)

> It contains a lot of interesting new features.  Are there any plans to
> merge some of the nix-daemon changes into our guix-daemon?

Why not?  What did you have in mind?  One thing we discussed long ago
was the idea of keeping signatures in the store database, and I think
Nix 2.0 does that.  That’s something we could borrow.

> Is compatibility with the nix-daemon a goal of the Guix project?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a worthy goal, as in, it would
cost more than it’s worth.  guix-daemon is already incompatible with
nix-daemon on a few things, such as the “builtin:download” derivation
builder.

> Can we take inspiration from any of the non-daemon features and use
> them in Guix?

Definitely.

> Conversely, is there anything we can upstream to Nix that they might
> find useful?

Changes in the daemon are pretty much the only thing we could upstream,
and I used to do exactly that.  At some point I decided to stop
following closely upstream and allow ourselves to change the daemon as
we see fit.  As a result, you may find that not every change that we
make to our nix/ directory is directly applicable to current Nix.

I’m also hopeful that we can move to a Guile-based daemon in the future.

Overall, I think Nix and Guix still have a lot to share, probably not in
terms of code, but at least in terms of design, features, and ideas.
The discussions with Eelco at the Guix Workshop demonstrated that!

Ludo’.