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2013-10-20.log
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<zacts>so technically how does guix differ from portage/emerge? <mark_weaver>the most salient feature is perhaps the dependability: if an upgrade breaks anything, you can always roll back. <mark_weaver>package builds are purely functional, in the sense of purely functional programming. <mark_weaver>also, unprivileged users can install their own software using guix, such that the guix daemon builds software on the user's behalf, in a way that allows sharing but cannot break anything for anyone else. <zacts>I read/watched that. just was wondering if I missed anything cool or unique. <Steap>zacts: Per-user package installation is quite unique, not sure if any other package management system does that <zacts>yeah, that's cool. iirc pkgsrc kind of allows for that. <zacts>but in a totally different way <Steap>oh, I should take a look at that <Steap>I've heard about it, it's kind of like FreeBSD ports, right ? <zacts>I think you must have a separate pkgsrc tree per user to do this though.. <Steap>Guix lets you compile software or fetch binaries <Steap>which I don't think is possible with pkgsrc <zacts>but you run ./bootstrap --unprivileged to install as a normal user <zacts>pkgsrc allows for either compiling software or fetching binaries <zacts>it is supposed to be portable on a wide range of platforms, but I personally have experienced a lot of breakage and bugs. <Steap>do they have rollbacks and a Scheme-like DSL ? :p <zacts>I wonder how guix + zfs or btrfs, both filesystems which allow for snapshots, could work.. <zacts>which sentence are you asking about? <zacts>well zfs/btrfs allows for snapshots and rollbacks and so does guix. <Steap>I guess it probably "just" works <zacts>anyway, enough of my rambling. I'm going to install guix on my box again. <Steap>Install it on a btrfs system :) <mark_weaver>the btrfs/zfs approach to snapshots is interesting, but there's one problem: you can't really have access to both the new and old versions at the same time. while btrfs (and maybe zfs, dunno) allows you to mount multiple snapshots at the same time, they will be at different mount points, which means that the software on at least one of those mount points probably won't work properly. <mark_weaver>in the Guix/Nix approach, you can experiment with the new versions while still using the old versions. and one user can use the old versions while another user uses the new versions, etc. <mark_weaver>more generally, you might actually need two different versions of a library somewhere in the middle of the software stack, because maybe one higher-level component requires a new version, and another higher-level component is broken on the new version. with the guix/nix approach, there's no problem. each higher-level component can use a different version of the same lower-level component. <zacts>one last question. are only geeks allowed to hack on guix, or are nerds allowed also? <gzg>Is cppunit packaged? I checked "package -A" and it wasn't there, but that always hasn't been the most reliable for me. :^P <gzg>It doesn't come up via the online package list either, so I'll assume not. <gzg>mark_weaver: where would an appropriate place for it to go? Right now I have it in rtorrent.scm. <mark_weaver>not sure, but rtorrent.scm sounds like a bad place for it. <gzg>mark_weaver: I'll leave a note for myself, in the file -- but it's now packaged. :^) <gzg>Libtorrent just built successfully also! <mark_weaver>cool! the important thing is to get the package working. moving it later is easy :) <phant0mas>guix is working well in arch,and I am starting guix-daemon as a daemon in systemd <phant0mas>but probably I forgot something because I have to stop it and the start it again, in order for it to work normally <phant0mas>where can I find a list with all the available packages in guix? <Steap>you could run guix package -A