From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Fabio Pesari Subject: Guix as a Guile package manager Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2016 11:35:13 +0100 Message-ID: <5690E261.8000704@gnu.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:53129) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aHqri-0003iC-Qr for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 09 Jan 2016 05:35:24 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aHqrg-0004Or-ON for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 09 Jan 2016 05:35:22 -0500 List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: guix-devel@gnu.org, guile-devel@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.