Re: GNU Guix 0.8.3 released

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

+1 Guix for bioinformatics

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 08:34:52AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> (Reduced the Cc)
> 
> > Now to the cons (the prior was the pros): I donnu about Guile Scheme,
> > heard from former Cygnus ppl (including Ian Taylor IIRC) it was a
> > mistake.
> 
> A language change is not going to happen.
> 
> I should say that one of the main reasons why I took interest in Guix
> was Guile.  As an Emacs user and Scheme fan I’m obviously biased towards
> '(list guile elisp racket), but I really think that using Guile makes
> Guix really attractive: package recipes are just Scheme objects
> that also contain quoted code to be run at build time.
> 
> This approach of just using one flexible language makes it very easy to
> use Guix as a library, as shown by Guix Web, a web interface for Guix,
> or the Emacs user interface.
> 
> I’m very glad Guix isn’t built on Python or JavaScript...
> 
> > Is this why it doesn’t make any buzz or is it because you don’t try
> > hard enough to contact the papers???  Would be nice if someone signed
> > up to advocate Guix for distress etc…
> 
> Guix is a pretty young project.  I wouldn’t worry so much about adoption
> at this point.
> 
> That said, Guix is becoming a serious contender for enabling
> reproducible scientific environments in bioinformatics.  At the
> bioinformatics institute where I have my system administrator hat on
> we’re using Guix on two clusters.  It helps that Guix now has packages
> for a great number of common scientific applications, libraries, and
> language environments.
> 
> For bioinformatics people there is a separate mailing list on which Guix
> is discussed for use in bioinformatics environments:
> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/bio-packaging
> 
> ~~ Ricardo
> 
> 

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