Re: Request for assistance maintaining LibreWolf

[Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net>]

Hi,

> so, i think a lot of packages should be in channels. probably everything that is not essential for a minimally functional system that can bootstrap itself. part of python could be in the main guix repo, but whatever is not tightly needed could go into a channel with its own access control management.

I have the same feeling. As I wrote on IRC a while ago[1]: “Perhaps
the Docker faction is right and traditional distributions are dead,
because they simply cannot (with reasonable effort) provide a coherent
set of packages any more. Maybe we have to embrace that approach and
reduce Guix to a minimal set of packages needed to build Guix itself
and then build (possibly incompatible) channels on top of that.”

For alot of the more complex packages we’ll probably have to go as far
as having a separate channel for each of them. And thus a prerequisite
for this setup to work is that this hypothetical “Guix Zero” will
have excellent support for dozens of channels with even more modules
inside of them[2].

Lars

[1] https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix-hpc/2024-05-03.log#102354
[2] I believe Guile is still the limiting factor here, since there’s
    a maximum number of modules that can be loaded.