Comment by taylanub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylanub | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry but I have to disagree on pretty much every single point. In part you simply make factual errors.

I think the page looks fairly stylish. Could improve, but pretty great already in choice of colors and layout. ("Dehydrated urine" for a simple gold color? Seriously? Stop watching watersports.)

Being 100% free software as in GNU, meaning being entirely free of uninspectable binary blobs, and working hard to make the system easily improvable and amendable by the user community, is a big deal. Deal with it. GNU aims for people for whom these are important criteria.

The features listed in the second point are based in concepts that are nontrivial to grok. There is no short way to explain them on an intro front page, but not mentioning them would be silly since they are what sets Guix apart from standard package managers (which ironically is what you request being listed). Maybe you should look up the meanings of those terms instead of straight out assuming they're marketing buzz. Transactional updates, and unprivileged/user-level package management are pretty big deals. Likewise, providing clean APIs in a high-level programming/scripting language is very much a big deal; see how easily a web front-end could be made for Guix.

Redirecting newcomers to Nix would just add an unnecessary layer of indirection. The name is clearly a homage to Nix, and also otherwise "everybody knows" that Guix is Guile+Nix, so claiming there's malicious intent in leaving out a mention of Nix would be just silly. And Guix is not a Guile wrapper around Nix; it has an entirely different package recipe format and database. You don't use Guix to work with a Nix system; rather the Guix system uses a low-level component taken from Nix. Casual users don't need to know anything about Nix.

Lastly, functional package management brings immense pragmatic benefits (source-binary correspondence, reliability of transactional updates, etc.), i.e. it's not simply a dogmatic application of FP concepts to package management. You'll note that Guix uses Scheme, not Haskell. I think most people interested in functional package management are so for the practical benefits, so I think you have a pretty wrong image of those folks.

All in all, please make sure you have a proper understanding of a topic before making such inflammatory remarks. It doesn't help anyone.

I do have a proper understanding of the topic. One of my servers runs NixOS, and I am a big proponent of declarative programming in general but functional programming in particular. There are of course MASSIVE BENEFITS to declarative package management, I myself use Puppet and Boxen to manage my development environment. I don't think I denied that? I was just saying that in my experience the people who are able to see the practical benefits are functional programmers in large part due to their prior experience with declarative programming. I'm speaking from my experience with the NixOS community that a much greater proportion of its users are functional programmers than probably any other OS.

Maybe the same isn't true for Guix. I don't know. However, I do have to contest got point about free software. Yes, it's extremely important, but it's also true for every GNU project. I know it's free software because it's a GNU project, not because they told me at the top of their website. It's their brand. It's like if Apple put "Bauhaus-esque minimalist design" at the top of every product page. It's their brand. Now I don't expect the FSF to be very aware of their brand identity, but that's not a good thing and if you think it really needs to be said that Guix is a free software project when it's hosted on gnu.org I'm not sure why we're having this conversation.

Perhaps buzzwords was the wrong word. Yes, I understand that these concepts are nontrivial. In fact, I understand it well because I do grok them, and that's part of why I'm able to say that it's very daunting for a newcomer to see all of those words and not understand what they mean. This hews very close to the free software tradition of "if you don't understand this immediately you don't deserve to be here" which is a toxic attitude that needs to be eliminated. At the very least, it looks clumsy and more than anything else it's abundantly clear that the writer of those words has forgotten what it's like to be a newbie.

I don't think they should redirect to Nix, far from it. It's a different project. That's simply irrational. I meant to imply that I was surprised that their site sucked so bad when their project is downstream from a project with one of the best homepages I've ever seen for a free software venture. And no, the casual users don't need to know about Nix, but if it's important that the name be an homage to it should it not at least be mentioned?

Yes, I'm completely aware of the difference between Scheme and Haskell, and I know what Guile is or I wouldn't have clicked on this thread in the first place. (a decision I'm rapidly beginning to regret)

The bottom line is that there are simpler and more lucid alternative ways of saying what they want to say there and it's not for want of examples that they don't. Good artists copy, great artists steal, as the saying goes. They should be great artists and alter their design to reflect principles that are obvious in the design of nixos.org. Or alternatively, since their project is a derivative, they could ask the Nix maintainers if they could use some of the look and feel.

And it is absolutely a Guile front end to the Nix system, this is completely uncontroversial and expressed clearly in their readme:

"GNU Guix is Nix[0] from Guile[1]!

Concretely, it allows Nix package management to be done entirely in Scheme. The goal is to investigate whether Scheme, and in particular the ability to define EDSLs, would allow it to fulfill the role of the Nix language."

"* How It Works

Guix does the high-level preparation of a /derivation/. A derivation is the promise of a build; it is stored as a text file under =/nix/store/xxx.drv=. The (guix derivations) module provides the `derivation' primitive, as well as higher-level wrappers such as `build-expression->derivation'.

Guix does remote procedure calls (RPCs) to the Nix daemon (the =nix-worker --daemon= command), which in turn performs builds and accesses to the Nix store on its behalf. The RPCs are implemented in the (guix store) module."

It builds from the Nix package archive, it works by communicating with the Nix daemon, it wouldn't exist without Nix.

I'm not sure how else I can express this, you spent your entire post trying to prove that I don't know what I'm talking about by repeating concepts I am intimately familiar with.

There are absolutely short ways to explain the nontrivial concepts, and NixOS does it well.

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