Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[david larsson <david.larsson@selfhosted.xyz>]

On 2022-03-17 13:56, zimoun wrote:
> Hi Olivier,
> 
>> On another note, what I find fascinating is why Guix and Nix are not
>> more used in academic papers.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> One part of the answer is, IMHO: it is difficult to spread the word.
> 
> For instance, with co-authors, we have tried to write a short paper
> detailing what Guix solves, i.e., the computational environment part of
> the “science crisis“, and targeting especially bioinfo folks.  We got
> many refusals by the journals that bioinfo folks indeed read and we end
> in a “specialized” journal.
> 
> On the top of that, add the fact that most of the time, people use what
> other people in their lab or collaborators already use.
> 
> On the top of that, add the fact that the story of Guix on Windows or
> Mac is not really good.  I am not arguing here, just to mention that
> many people are still using Windows or Mac and few one Linux variant.
> 
> Therefore, all in all, the bootstrap of Guix is hard; as always. :-)
> 
> The initiative Guix-HPC is an attempt to address that.  The name is
> probably not fully representative since now it looks like Guix in
> scientific context; HPC being only one component.
> 
> From my point of view, the bootstrap of Guix in scientific world
> requires more documentation materials for many common use cases and 
> more
> popular applications or usual scientific stack.  For instance PyTorch 
> in
> Guix is one step but many things are still really hard to do with Guix
> when it is not elsewhere.  Another instance is RStudio for bioinfo 
> folks
> – it does not work out of the box with Guix when it does elsewhere.
> 
> Help in these both areas – howto materials and popular applications – 
> is
> very welcome. :-)
> 
> Join the fun, join guix-science@gnu.org :-)
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> simon

I run Guix including GUI applications from Windows via WSL2 (Windows 
Subsystem for Linux). It may help some to try it out if this setup was 
easier and more documented, though I suppose that is somewhat prevented 
to go via official channels by the FSDG guidelines.

Best regards,
David