Re: Getting rid of build tools

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:
>
>> For anyone interested, Eelco's description of Maak, a functional make,
>> is here:
>>
>>   http://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/iscsd-scm11-submitted.pdf
>
> It would be interesting to see what a Maak translated to Guile + Guix
> would look like.
>
> The ‘makeLibrary’, ‘compileC’, and other functions used as illustrations
> in the paper would be quite easy to write using our current APIs.
>
> Ludo’.

Reading this... it's interesting.  It looks like Nix and Maak don't
share code, but do share ideas and contributors (and a founder)?

So, assuming we had that theoretical guix-make, would it be usable
without running Guix as a full package manager, or without running the
daemon necessarily?  That might be more interesting, and in a way might
encourage more people to install Guix on their machines.  If it can't be
done in a clean way, we shouldn't consider forcing that.

I worry a bit that not everyone will be willing to devote to using
/gnu/store/ and having the daemon on their distribution for building.

 - Chris