Re: AUR for GuixSD

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

David Craven <david@craven.ch> skribis:

> So how rigid are you on the gnu system thing? Was jookia right that
> you won't accept patches that will make guixsd a gnu system or
> something else? ;-)

As Ricardo wrote, we accept all free software packages.  We favor the
GNU ones when there’s a choice, which means using them by default in
GuixSD.

> I did some work on using musl as a libc on nixos for embedded systems,
> I came here because I thought it was more hackable. I guess if you're
> not interested in uboot, this is a non starter...

Again, U-Boot is very welcome.

Now, it’s very clear that some packages are trickier than others.
What’s tricky with U-Boot is adding support for an alternative
bootloader in GuixSD’s machinery, which is currently limited to GRUB
(this is what Jookia worked on.)  There are non-trivial design choices
to make when introducing such changes.  Also, from a maintainer’s
viewpoint, we must also make sure that the additional feature will be
maintainable and maintained.

Likewise, let’s say you want to add musl and build all your packages
with Clang and musl.  Guix provides all the flexibility to do that.
However, IMO, Guix as a project should not commit to maintain (and
build) this variant of the system, because it would be a lot of extra
work.  I’d rather have GNU/Linux work well than have the repo contain
several half-baked experimental systems.

I hope this clarifies things!

Ludo’.