Dear Tobias,

thank you for your fast and comprehensive answer.

On arch I never had any problem; it was on debian 11 that the packages
were outdated. However I did a guix pull and now icecat is recent.

Curious if I forgot to do so the last time I tried to install icecat 91
I looked at my bash history. And that's what I found:

 > 1157  guix pull
 > 1158  echo $PATH
 > 1159  source .bashrc
 > 1160  [...]
 > 1161  echo $PATH
 > 1162  [...] 
 > 1163  guix 
 > 1164  guix --help
 > 1165  guix pull
 > 1166  guix install icecat
 > 1167  guix search icecat

It looks as if guix first was not found but then it was found an I
definitively did a pull before trying to install icecat 91. But it was
only the older version that was found by guix. That was why I did the
search command later on.

Strange! Anyway, now it works.

Cheers,
Alex


On Do, Nov 11 2021, 12:45:58, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:

> Alexander,
>
> I don't have personal experience but think it likely that
> Trisquel/Debian is used by more contributors than Arch, which means
> that integration bugs are more likely to be noticed and fixed.  The 
> difference shouldn't be significant, and we're always open to bug
> reports from Guix on other GNU/Linux distributions.  Most contributors 
> run Guix System.
>
> However:
>
> On 2021-11-11 11:59, Alexander Asteroth wrote:
>> I've tried
>> arch and debian 11 and noticed that the packages available in Guix
>> under
>> arch are way more recent (e.g icecat 91 vs 6x) and more in general.
>
> Something's wrong.  Guix provides a single rolling release across all
> Guix Systems and foreign distributions.
>
> The 'guix' packages for foreign distributions install an older
> snapshot of Guix which sets up the daemon and puts a 'guix' command in
> the global $PATH.
>
> Users are expected to run 'guix pull' (similar to 'pacman -S' but per
> user--never sudo!) to update it.  This will update both guix itself
> and the list of availabe packages.
>
>> Also I'm asking myself how Guix deals with different
>> systems/kernels/base installations and how it decides which packages
>> will work?
>
> It doesn't.  Either your Arch system isn't properly configured so that
> 'command -v guix' returns ~/.config/guix/current/bin/guix, or you 
> haven't run 'guix pull' to create or update that copy of guix.
>
> If you have run 'guix pull' and still see outdated packages, let us
> know.  There's something wrong with the system then.
>
>> Isn't there any dependence? Is this documented somewhere?
>
> Once installed, Guix expects little more from the host system than a
> reasonably modern Linux kernel (supporting certain namespaces,
> syscalls & the like) and minimal configuration like a running Guix
> daemon, the guixbuild* users, mounted /dev, etc.  I don't think these
> are formally documented in a single place.
>
> If available, the 'guix' package on a foreign distribution will set
> that up for you: it can depend on foreign packages, set up
> users/groups, support uninstallation, etc., in a cleaner way than the
> guix-install.sh shell script can.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> T G-R
>
> Sent from a Web browser.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.