Guix as a Guile package manager

[Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org>]

Package managers have been immensely successful in increasing the
popularity of programming languages - think about Perl's CPAN or Ruby's
Gem. But Guile doesn't a package manager, and that in my opinion slows
down its adoption.

The Guix repos distribute a lot of useful Guile libraries (like
guile-json or guile-opengl) which can't be found on most distro
repositories and it already provides Guile APIs and package management
capabilities...my question is, can Guix be forked into a full-blown
Guile package manager like gem from Ruby?

I know that an argument could be made that Guix can already be used in
this way, but there are many Scheme coders who don't need a system-wide
package manager and would rather use a program that can manage Guile
packages under a user root like ~/.guile and allow them to easily
distribute their packages (something like Python's virtualenvs would
also be useful).

Perhaps some of the Guix code can be moved to a library, so that both
the Guix and the Guile package manager binaries can reuse the same code.
Moving Guix' core to a library would also facilitate its inclusion in
things like PackageKit, as well as make it easier to create front-ends.

I'm not a package management expert so I'm not sure this idea is
feasible but I would really like Guile to become more
popular, and this I think would be a step in the right direction.