Re: Installing Guix easily on other distros

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Ricardo Wurmus
> <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> wrote:
>>
>> Thompson, David <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
>>
>>> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Hartmut Goebel
>>> <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> today on irc, there was discussion about that Guix should be easily
>>>> installable and manageable in other distros being higher priority. This
>>>> could attract more users to ry out Guix. So I created a draft .spec-file
>>>> for building and installing Guix o RPM-based systems like Fedora.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe someone using Fedora may want to add a package request in their
>>>> bug-tracker. I already did for Mageia.
>>>
>>> This has come up several times, and I agree that we should provide
>>> packages for popular GNU/Linux distributions.  However, Guix *cannot*
>>> be made available in many distros official repositories (most notably
>>> Debian and Fedora) because Guix violates their policies, such as:
>>>
>>> - Software must conform to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
>>> (violation: Guix introduces the /gnu directory)
>>> - Software must be bootstrapped from source (violation: Guix requires
>>> a set of bootstrap binaries that *cannot* be replaced by the distro
>>> without changing the hashes of every package, effectively preventing
>>> them from receiving binaries from hydra.gnu.org)
>>>
>>> Guix is at odds with other distros because it is a distro itself.  So,
>>> I think what would be best is for users of these distros to host Guix
>>> packages in popular places for third-party packages, like Arch's AUR
>>> or Fedora's COPR:
>>>
>>> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/guix/
>>> https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lantw44/guix/
>>>
>>> What would be even better is if people *told us* when they made a
>>> package.  I learned about these indirectly, long after they were
>>> originally available.
>>
>> Could we add the .spec, PKGBUILD, and debian files to the Guix
>> repository?  I know of many projects that include the package manifests
>> to simplify building packages for major distributions.
>>
>> An advantage would be that we knew about these files and users wouldn’t
>> have to search around for the latest package sources.
>
> That sounds like a good idea.  I would welcome patches for such things.

Seconded (as long as it’s one or two files per distro.)

Ludo’.