Re: GSoC ideas

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Thompson, David writes:

> On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Christopher Allan Webber
> <cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
>> What I'm talking about is Guix *as a package
>> manager* to be able to be available on foreigh distros so I can
>> encourage friends to do:
>>
>>   apt-get install guix
>>
>> ... and then do user-space hacking with Guix, and use "guix environment"
>> for hacking on my projects...  I think we'd increase our userbase
>> dramatically by getting Guix as a user-space pacakge manager into
>> various distros.
>
> Such packages would be convenient for users of these distros, but
> getting them into Debian and Fedora proper is unlikely because Guix
> does not conform to the FHS.
>
> - Dave

So, I talked about this with Stefano Zacchiroli while at FOSDEM.  He
suggested that we could do /opt/g/ or something like that and we *could*
get Guix in as a package manager to Debian.  Sure, it wouldn't be able
to use the Hydra packages, but it's probably okayish.

(We *might* be able to get Guix in even using the Hydra packages if the
Guix daemon could have a wrapper which bind-mounts it to /gnu/ or
something, when it starts up?  That might be a bit over the top, but
maybe would allow us to have both.  I'm not so sure about this strategy
though, I've just been bouncing it around in my head.)

We could also build apt / rpm packages which we just provide ourselves,
on the Guix website, or by providing some PPA'ish thing.  I would have
preferred this myself when I started running Debian on Guix... and in
this route we could keep everything as it already is.  (But people will
have to take an extra step to "get to" those nice packages.)

 - Chris