Discussion on Parameterized Packages

[Sarthak Shah <shahsarthakw@gmail.com>]

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Hello Guix!
I'll be working on bringing Parameterized Packages to Guix for GSoC 2023
under the guidance of Gábor and Pjotr. I've been a Guix user for a few
years now as it works great for Common Lisp and Scheme projects, and I've
always wanted to contribute to it as it has one of the best codebases I've
seen. Parameterized Packages will serve as an awesome feature that
leverages Guix's dedication to ensuring that all packages can be compiled
from source.
Parameterized Packages will introduce functionality similar to Gentoo's USE
flags, making it possible to change compile-time options for packages. This
will provide users with a lot more freedom over what features they'd like
to include or exclude from packages, and also aid with reducing the size of
binaries.
I have provided a detailed outline of parameterized packages and the
proposed user interface for interacting with them (for both users and
maintainers) in this post on my blog:
https://blog.lispy.tech/2023/05/parameterized-packages.html
I would really appreciate feedback on
(1) parameters you'd like to see in Guix
(2) the user interface for searching/installing/packaging with parameters
A lot of these details are still in a draft phase and thus any suggestions
that could help polish them would be awesome!
Here's a list of parameters I think would be cool to have:
graphics-related: x11, gtk, qt, motif etc.
media-related: png, jpeg, mp4, flac etc.
playback-related: pulseaudio, alsa, jack etc.
locales: en_us, ja_jp etc.
(possibly) optimizations: jit, o3, ofast, lto, graphite etc.
fundamental: unicode, debug, examples etc.

Please let me know what you think!
Happy Hacking,
Sarthak.

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