Guix on Debian (was: GSoC ideas)

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Diane Trout writes:

>> That looks like the way forward to me. Such a package can setup and
>> start the daemon - which is enough. No need to get the blessing from
>> the distributions themselves (will take time, but it will come -
>> there
>> really is no difference with allowing foreign packages to work
>> anyway).
>
>
> I wrote a basic Debian recipe to build guix, create the build users,
> and install the systemd config file.
>
> https://github.com/detrout/debian-guix
>
> Currently I've only split the guix package into the emacs components
> and everything else. I'd thought about splitting the daemon out into
> its own package, but I wasn't sure what the daemon depended on.
>
> The daemon is still using the default /gnu/store path, and the user
> needs to manually run guix authorize if they want to use hydra
> binaries. The package is currently based on the stable 0.9.0 release,
> and I'm not sure how security updates make it into a guix store if you
> without updating the scheme packaging source tree.
>
> It might be nice to prompt the user if they wanted to authorize hydra
> on install but that's not implemented.
>
> Currently its unlikely to go into Debian because Debian policy requires
> everything to be built from source, and currently the Guix build
> process downloads some bootstrap binaries.
>
> However with the current packaging "guix environment --pure bash --
> bash" does give me a clean guix environment, and the guix info docs get
> installed when Debian emacs can see them.
>
> Diane

Great work Diane!

Are those bootstrapping binaries really necessary for getting Guix
going?  I guess for some reason I thought if you did the whole
configure/make/etc dance it wouldn't be but maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe this is a good step towards getting a Guix .deb we self-host on
the Guix website?

 - Chris