Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

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