Re: Introducing GNU Guix

[Adam Spiers]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Brandon Invergo <address@hidden> skribis:
>>> 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.

[snipped]

> There’s also GNU Stow.
>
> There’s definitely a fair amount of overlap here, and I’m guilty for
> adding some more.

When GNU Stow was first conceived / implemented many years ago, it
made sense to describe it as a package manager.  However, the world
has moved on considerably since then, and it no longer has anything
close to feature parity with what people have grown to expect from
modern package managers, such as dependency management, checksumming,
etc.  Consequently, a while ago I modified the description of Stow on
its home page to be more modest and in keeping with modern
terminology: I believe it is now best described as a "symlink farm
manager", and I have also just updated the description on the savannah
project page accordingly.

So you should probably not worry too much about any overlap with Guix,
although it *may* be instructive to consider the fundamental design
differences between a symlink-based approach and one which does not
rely on symlinks.