Comment by civodul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by civodul | Hacker News Reader

As a Guix person, I pretty much disagree with Joey's conclusion that some things—essentially QA and license checks—may “need to be jettisoned”. Those things, to me as a user, are one of the big pluses of Debian (and hopefully Guix).

Yet, it’s pretty obvious that today, traditional distros can no longer pretend to provide every single free software package that’s out there—let alone providing them with the level of QA and polishing that Debian, Fedora, Guix, and others provide.

In Guix we currently semi-automatically import package definitions from third-party repos like Hackage, PyPI, and the likes, for which we do some additional QA: https://gnu.org/s/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-import... .

One idea we discussed would be to offer as an option the ability to to “live imports”: users could install packages imported on the fly from these repos, while still taking advantage of the Guix user interface, transactional upgrades and rollback, and other goodies.

That could be a way to address user needs without throwing the baby with the water. There are technical challenges before we can get there, though…

I'm kind of surprised to see Guix described as having a high level of QA and polishing, akin to Debian and Fedora. It's not that I have experience with it being otherwise, but I thought that I couldn't expect it to be any more polished than NixOS, given that, at least as I understand it, it's basically a remake but using scheme in place of the nix language and running in an (almost) pure GNU OS instead of linux and friends like systemd. It's younger, uses less tested technology (linux-libre/Hurd and shepherd; with the exception of scheme (not that I dislike the nix lang)), and I imagine has less of a following to test it on this niche that NixOS and Guix belong to.

I'm going to install GuixSD one of these days to try it out. Installing directly from third-party repos is something I don't remember seeing in NixOS when I tried it a year ago. I'm interested to see what other differences in design choices have been made.

The QA part has to do with processes, not technique (Scheme vs. Nix, etc.) I think we (Guix) are doing pretty good with our review process for packages and general attention to packaging issues—bundling, security issues, package size, integration, etc. These are practices similar to those of Debian, though I must say Debian remains the gold standard to me. :-)

As for GuixSD, you are right that the Shepherd, for instance, is not as mature as systemd (it’s also much simpler though). My comment was referring to packaging QA.

I do think that the ability to statically check a number of properties on a GuixSD config before it’s even instantiated (something that using a general purpose language buys us) helps a lot, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com