Re: Tiny Guix (and containers)

[Dave Love <fx@gnu.org>]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

> But, really, I think when talking embedded systems and containers we
> all want tiny. Even HPC can benefit. Tiny containers may be an
> attractive proposition.

Yes, containers aside, dependencies in Guix are one of the reasons I'm
currently unconvinced by its trades-off for HPC use; the closure a
single package can be comparable with the whole compute node image I
used to maintain with rpm.  Even then, you don't generally have
debugging info available.

I suppose the general point is that Guix seems to have rejected
experience from other distributions, and it's not clear to me why.  (I
don't mean it should necessarily follow them, of course.)  Is there any
summary of the rationale for different decisions like not splitting
packages into development and runtime and other components, packaging
static libraries, and discarding debugging information, for instance?