IRC channel logs

<teddd19>Hi is anyone from Berlin here ?

<drakonis>there's some folks here?

<teddd19>yop

<drakonis>rekado's from berlin

<teddd19>ah nice

<teddd19>I'm new to both guix and hpc but I am curious of what is being done here

<drakonis>well, this is a irc channel for the guix hpc crowd

<teddd19>I was wondering if people use guix in some universities/other in Berlin

<drakonis>yes they do

<teddd19>ah :)

<teddd19>where ?

<drakonis> http://hpc.guix.info/channels/ this should have some of the repositories run by universities

<teddd19>nice

<drakonis>inria, mdc-berlin, university of tennessee, umc utrecht

<drakonis>the generic guix-science repo doesnt have any particular affiliation

<drakonis>i think there's another repo organization that contains packages from multiple universities

<drakonis>including one from brazil

<drakonis> https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-hpc this one

<drakonis>ufrgs, neat.

<teddd19>nice thanks, I'll have a look

<teddd19>ufrgs ?

<drakonis>universidade federal do rio grande do sul

<drakonis>its from brazil

<teddd19>ah

<drakonis>brazil represent.

<teddd19>:)

<drakonis>you don't really hear a lot about it in the grand scheme of things

<teddd19>I have the same feeling

<drakonis>i'm happy that guix is growing

<drakonis>everywhere.

<teddd19>Yes me too

<teddd19>it seems to be both good for serious work and for everyday use

<teddd19>I'm curious where the project will go, which people it will in the end reach

<drakonis>there's still room for improvement in several components

<drakonis>ie: shepherd

<drakonis>CLI improvements

<drakonis>packages and services.

<teddd19>yes of course, it's very young still

<drakonis>as well as adding more tools to it

<teddd19>Yes the user experience is still a bit rough

<drakonis>certainly.

<drakonis>it is nowhere as rough as, say, nix

<teddd19>But somehow I have more fun hacking on it since I know it can directly land in a package that will work for everyone

<teddd19>this is so great

<teddd19>what do you mean with nix ? you find it less pleasant to use ?

<drakonis>i do.

<teddd19>ah interesting. I never used it really but I heard it was more mature and stuff.

<teddd19>can you explain ?

<drakonis>it is mature in the sense that it does not leave you wanting for packages and services

<drakonis>but it is highly contrived to use and learn

<teddd19>I see

<drakonis>its impressive that they offer large amounts of computationally generated package sets, however, they're not particularly well curated most of the time

<drakonis>was fiddling with R packages and the ways required to expose them to an application that consumes R packages is not very fun

<teddd19>btw I saw that in niw you can define a shell and set env variables in it using nix-shell. I though in guix it would be guix environment but then you cannot define env var. Is there a way to do it ? For now I just use a script but it feels wrong.

<teddd19>Ah I see.

<teddd19>I have the impression that the quality standard in guix is very high

<teddd19>I hope this will not decrease if it gets more popular

<drakonis> https://nixos.wiki/wiki/R

<drakonis>check the rstudio section

<drakonis>if i want to do the exact same thing with guix, all i need is to either install the packages to my user profile or enter an environment with them

<teddd19>Yes seems very laborious indeed

<teddd19>I guess that's the advantage of being inspired by nix, so stuff could be better designed from ground up

<drakonis>indeed it is

<drakonis>the packaging model is different, as well.

<drakonis>since in guix's worldview, they're all packages, it is a bit more... flat i guess?

<drakonis>in nix, it can get fairly complex

<drakonis>as for guix growing and quality declining, i would say it might be less likely to happen due to how it handles extra repositories

<teddd19>I tought it was the language that gave me the impression it is more intricate but you might be right. Coming from emacs am used to declare arbitrarly complex stuff in lisp

<drakonis>unlike nix, where its singular megarepository moves so fast that it requires upstreaming packages, guix lets you easily maintain your own

<drakonis>nix has an absurd amount of low value/throwaway packages

<teddd19>yes I found that also true on debian

<teddd19>I wonder if this is not just a consequence of the user base

<drakonis>as well as inconsistent packages

<drakonis>inconsistent quality

<teddd19>like there is no quality check ?

<drakonis>minimal

<teddd19>Interesting

<drakonis>if it builds, its fine?

<drakonis>its not something i like a lot about nix

<teddd19>I never contributed to guix yet so I'm not sure how things go. You need to get your patches double checked by someone right ?

<drakonis>hmmm, there's a guide on the docs regarding the contribution process

<drakonis>someone has to check and merge it

<teddd19>I see

<teddd19>in nix not ?

<drakonis>well... there is some level of overseeing patch merges but they have patch CI

<drakonis>things get merged rather fast because they build

<drakonis>this is what i have observed

<teddd19>I see

<teddd19>btw do you have a hint on this problem I have with defining env variables for a new shell like nix-shell would ?

<drakonis>i don't think there's a nix-shell equivalent on guix

<drakonis>you could probably call guile procedures to do something similar

<drakonis>this question would be best for the main channel though?

<drakonis>#guix

<teddd19>you're right

<teddd19>I'll ask there

<drakonis>one thing i should point out about the lack of a nix-shell equivalent is that the packages are a lot cleaner about interop

<drakonis>as i pointed earlier with regards to rstudio

<drakonis>since nearly everything in nix is wrapped

<teddd19>wrapped ?

<drakonis>basically, using shell scripts to put binaries, libraries or directories into scope

<drakonis>heck, even envvars

<drakonis>so you have to do a lot of hoop jumping to get languages to see libraries

<drakonis>guix wraps python and makes every python package depend on the wrapped version instead of requiring you to run a function to create said wrapper every time you want to access the environment

<drakonis>and the wrapped version in nix doesnt play well with other packages that want it.

<drakonis>its mindbogglingly contrived

<teddd19>Ah now I see what you mean

<drakonis>its not visible to the entire environment, just to the specific package wrapper it got added to

<drakonis>its not fun to work with and guix has the upper hand on this

<drakonis>do ask your question on #guix, they'll be happy to help btw

<teddd19>Sure, thanks for the push :)

<drakonis>always work on guile and guix tho

<teddd19>what do you mean ?

<drakonis>i mean that work done to improve both is always welcome

<teddd19>ah i get it

<drakonis>anyhow, i need to get some work done

<drakonis>peace.

<teddd19>see you !

<drakonis>well, guess we have a new user

IRC channel logs

2021-10-04.log