Re: [gnu-prog-discuss] Introducing GNU Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Luke,

"luke.leighton" <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Dmitry Bogatov <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 10:38 +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>>
>>> I am pleased to announce GNU Guix, an on-going project to build a
>>> functional package manager and associated free software distribution of
>>> the GNU system.
>
>  hi ludovic: looking things up, it appears to be based on this:
> http://nixos.org/nix/ just providing a link to that gives people a bit
> more descriptive information and it looks utterly cool.

Yes, thanks for mentioning it.

>  ludovic: so that people can tell from there what extra things guix
> has, could you describe the differences between nix and guix?  i
> notice scheme rather than haskell, is there anything else?

On the packaging side, the difference is the use of Scheme instead of
the Nix language (which, like Haskell, is a purely functional language
with lazy evaluation; but it’s not Haskell.)

Using Scheme instead of a specific language allows us to get all the
features and tooling that come with Guile (compiler, debugger, REPL,
Unicode, libraries, etc.)  And it means that we have a general-purpose
language, on top of which we can have embedded domain-specific languages
(EDSLs), such as the one used to define packages.  This broadens what
can be done in package recipes themselves, and what can be done around them.

The distribution itself has different goals: 100% free software, and
tight integration with GNU (preference of GNU tools by default).  The
bootstrapping approach is also different [0].

The rationale is discussed in my GHM talk at:

  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/guix-ghm-2012.20120721.pdf
  http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

Hope this clarifies things!

Ludo’.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-10/msg00000.html