Re: How to install GWL?

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi zimoun,

> The difference between "as a package" --which implies inferiors-- or
> "as a channel" is: embed vs extend.
>
> I was convinced that "as a package" was more convenient. Now I am not sure. :-)
> Because we know what "embed" means. ;-)
>
> For example, Julien's home-manager [1] uses the "as a channel" approach.

The home-manager *only* requires Guix.  The GWL needs wisp,
guile-commonmark, guile-gcrypt, guile-pfds (for sets),
guile-syntax-highlight, graphviz (for visualizing workflows), etc.  In
the future it might also depend on the Guile AWS library, perhaps even
some libraries that implement different schedulers, etc.  I’ve also been
thinking about adding a web interface to visualize the current state of
processes spawned by the workflow, which should make debugging workflows
much easier.

Channels don’t allow for any fancy installation or setup.  The Guile
modules provided by a channel are compiled just in time when running
“guix pull”.  It doesn’t seem like a good idea for the GWL to hook into
the channels mechanism when it doesn’t provide what channels were
designed to help implement: extensions to the package graph.

I think inferiors also give GWL users a feature that would otherwise be
missing: to run arbitrary workflows with arbitrary channel definitions
via inferiors without having to first manually execute “guix pull” to
switch to the particular channels that a workflow requires.  Using
inferiors gives a superior user experience, in my opinion.

--
Ricardo