Re: Guix on macOS

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Chris,

Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> skribis:

> I want to get Guix working on macOS.  I recently had a need to do this,
> and I was sad to find that although Nix works on macOS, Guix isn't quite
> there yet.  The manual makes it sound like this should be fairly
> straightforward, and I intend to give it a shot [1].  But before I
> begin, I wanted to know: has anyone done this already?  Is there
> interest?  I've checked the email lists, and I didn't find much
> discussion about this.

First of all, it’s never been a goal of Guix to run on non-GNU systems.
Now, I have nothing against it in principle, as long as (1) this can be
achieved in a maintainable way, and (2) the targeted user-land software
is free and buildable from source.

I suspect macOS fails criterion #2.  Back in the day (not sure if that’s
still the case), Nix would bootstrap using the system’s compiler and C
library (which meant that things were likely to break in subtle ways on
macOS upgrades.)

As for criterion #1, to me, that pretty much means sticking to the GNU
libc.  From my experience on Nixpkgs, having to deal with different C
libraries is a real burden.  It also leads to a situation where you have
second-class systems because they use an alternate libc and it’s not
uncommon for packages to fail to build against that libc.  To put it
differently: it’s already difficult enough to have *one* OS working.

I’m afraid this is not the answer you were looking for.  WDYT?

Ludo’.