Re: Help with .deb, .rpm and guix packaging.

[Catonano <catonano@gmail.com>]

Hi Aniket,

Il giorno gio 29 ott 2020 alle ore 17:35 Aniket Patil <
aniket112.patil@gmail.com> ha scritto:

> Hi,
> There are GNU/Linux distros which are Debian-based or fedora(Redhat) based
> etc. What I know to my knowledge is GNU packages are .tar packages with
> .deb and .rpm file format, am I right?
>
>
Ehm, I think you're not right, no

Software packages don't need to be expressed as files (.deb, .tar, .rmp or
any other format)

That's a convention, not a necessity

mainstream Linux distributions adopt such a convention

Others do not

As an analogy, If you say that packages are .deb files, it's as if you're
saying that a document is the paper it's printed on

So what would be the relationship between a file representing such document
and the papers that can be printed by it ?

Some will say that the hand signed paper is "the document"

Others will say that the LibreOffice file is the document


What I am wondering about how guix
> makes it happen? I mean are we bypassing the process of making the package
> in .deb and .rpm format and releasing it,


Guix doesn't release .deb or .rpm files for packages, no

but that's not "bypassing"

As long as distributing the file for a document is not bypassing the
distribution of printed copies


> or what exactly are we doing? To
> my knowledge, we are building from source code as we can see in the recipe.
> So that means we are bypassing the process of making packages explicitly
> for the distro, aren't we?
>

Guix is ensuring that that the binary bits belonging to a package (produced
by compilig its source code) it runs are the same on everymachine that
built
 the source with the same Guix recipe

And that's as an explicit producton of packages as I can think of

The idea that if there are no .deb files than the process is not explicit
is, in my opinion, not correct


> Where can I learn more about this? I am going through guix manual but I
> don't know which chapter to look for. Also, where can I learn more about
> packaging software on GNU/Linux distribution? Like .deb or .rpm
>

The manual doesn't mention files and file formats because it doesn't assume
that software packages and files are identified

Binary files are a support, as paper id for documents

But the packages exist independently of supports (as documents do)

Hope this helps