From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ricardo Wurmus Subject: AUR for GuixSD (was: GuixSD on arm (ng0)) Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2016 07:19:56 +0200 Message-ID: <87lh1fl4w3.fsf@elephly.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:49679) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bKfFn-00016Z-UX for help-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Jul 2016 01:20:09 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bKfFj-0001UK-Jj for help-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Jul 2016 01:20:06 -0400 Received: from sender163-mail.zoho.com ([74.201.84.163]:24098) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bKfFj-0001UF-9v for help-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Jul 2016 01:20:03 -0400 In-reply-to: List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-guix-bounces+gcggh-help-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Help-Guix" To: David Craven Cc: help-guix@gnu.org Hi David, > I don't see guixsd as a linux distro but more as a linux distro > building kit. I cannot resist… :) We see GuixSD as a variant of the GNU system. (I think the term “linux distro” had its run and can be retired now.) > Also on a related issue. At some point we may want something like the > AUR for packages that don't comply with the guix packaging guidelines > (for example linux-firmware). Or that have few users. So if I want to > write my own bootloader and convince my friends to use it - it should > not be in the guix tree, but it would be nice if there were a way to > publish my package. This is something I missed in nixos. This already exists or doesn’t, dependent on your point of view. Guix honours the GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable. Any collection of package modules in one of the directories mentioned in that variable will be usable by Guix. At the institute we use this for a local collection of packages[*]. *Anyone* can put together a repository and tell people to download it and add it to the GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH. It’s a lot like Ubuntu’s ppa in that regard. Anyone could start a “GUR” (Guix User Repository) project and try to convince others to use it. We prefer to have most packages in Guix itself, though. Packages that do not match the Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG), however, won’t be added to Guix upstream and also won’t be endorsed or advertised by the Guix project. This also means that we do not welcome recommendations to use non-free software on the mailing lists or the #guix IRC channel. ~~ Ricardo [*]: We do this primarily for the sake of reproducibility, secondarily for adding packages and package variants that are not useful or cannot be in Guix upstream. We use an unaltered version of the Guix upstream repository, and we have a separate package repository. Whenever a new free software package is needed I add it on my development branch and send a patch upstream for review. Immediately afterward I backport it to our separate repository. Both repositories are accessible on the Internet, which allows users to fully describe the state of their profiles with three things: - the hash-like value returned by “git describe /path/to/guix” - the hash-like value returned by “git describe /path/to/our/guix-addon” - a manifest Keeping things separate allows us to describe the state fully without having to publish a modified version of the full Guix repository. Other scientists can just take the two repositories and reset them to the given hashes, and then instantiate the manifest.