[Chicken-hackers] CHICKEN on GuixSD

[John J Foerch]

Hello,

I have been working with the operating system GuixSD
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/>, and for those not familiar, it is
similar to NixOS: programs get installed to a store, isolated from other
programs on the system, rather than to global directories like /bin,
/usr/bin, etc.  The 'bin' and 'lib' directories and so on end up as a
tree of symlinks pointing into the store - quite a novel approach to
package management that gives a number of unique features, but I
digress.

The guix chicken package has the problem that chicken-install does not
work, and I'm discussing solutions with guix devs, and thought it would
be helpful to put the question here as well.

When one installs chicken, it gets installed to the store, with a prefix
like this:

  /gnu/store/<hash>-chicken-4.11.0/

The binaries are under that in 'bin/', libchicken under it in 'lib/',
and the default extensions under the prefix in 'var/lib/chicken/8/'.
This store directory is read-only, so one encounters the impossibility
of installing more extensions.

It was suggested that to allow chicken-install to work, the global
/var/lib/chicken/8/ should be added to the extension path.  The problem
with that is of course that chicken supports only one repository-path,
so default extensions would have to go there too, as would any
extensions that were installed as guix packages, breaking the package
management paradigm of the store.

On NixOS, they patch chicken to allow additional repository paths given
by the environment variable CHICKEN_REPOSITORY_EXTRA and the chicken
variable repository-extra-paths.  It looks to me like Moritz and Caolan
have worked on this.

I wanted to ask what views chicken devs have on this kind of situation,
whether the patch that NixOS uses is a good way to go, and whether there
are plans for multiple repository paths to be added to chicken in the
future.

Link to the discussion on guix-user:

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.guix.user/776

Thank you,

--
John Foerch