Identifying Software
guix.gnu.org
guix.gnu.org
Regarding Free vs non-Free packages: this can be a pain point if your system requires non-Free packages to function on GNU Guix. I (like most other Guix users I would guess) use the nonguix[3] channel for additional packages. One of my systems requires the baseline Linux kernel for propriety Ethernet drivers (included in Linux because of GPLv2 :P), so I had to create a custom installation ISO with the baseline kernel. This probably sounds horrifying, but creating a custom installation ISO is actually very easy in Guix (and probably Nix as well). It's the only distro I've ever done it for.
But between the main Guix channel, nonguix, and Flatpak, it's very uncommon that I cannot find what I want. According to repology[4], Guix is the #5 repo for most packages. And the few packages that I have wanted that were missing, I have actually been able to contribute package definitions for upstream to Guix, since the process is very easy and well documented (also the only distro I have ever done that for).
[0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration....
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd
Besides, Guix uses Scheme everywhere, whereas Nix is a mix of the Nix language and lots of shell code. The Nix language is a pretty elegant lazy functional language, and yields very compact and clean code. But if you want to do complex things, Scheme might be easier.
So although Guix provides good mechanisms for isolating applications at runtime, you do have to put a lot of trust in the channels you're using.
(This is something I would like to see improved as a Guix user.)
It's a sandboxing feature similar to e.g. Firejail.
One can launch applications in a separate container, and choose whether to give access to the network, filesystem, and other environment variables.
I find this very convenient, and I wish Nix provided a similar feature.
How might it compare to eg using nsjail[1] or firecracker [2] or flatpak's sandbox[3]? These could be also good benchmarks for the documentation.
[1] https://github.com/google/nsjail
[2] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...
[3] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions-refer...
I think the pure option is not really for (security) sandboxing, but rather for making sure your programs do not use any dependencies that are not explicitly declared, i.e. to ensure referential transparency.
[1] https://github.com/lfam/guix/blob/master/gnu/build/linux-con...
This is not actually correct. Guix only ever used a copy of the nix-daemon, because there's no point in reinventing the derivation format or the low-level implementation of functional package management; no other part of nix/nixpkgs has been used to make Guix.
It doesn't boot on non-libre hardware.
In all seriousness, it uses Lisp. That is a _substantial_ advantage over Nix - which uses a home-grown language. As you can see from the front page today, there is roughly a million Nix-wrappers addressing the issue that people don't want to learn nixlang.
but I'm with you on "why in the holy hell reinvent the wheel". I need to dig back into Guix and see if it supports moving the store out of /gnu since on Cupertino's OS one cannot write to / without a bunch of stupidity <https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-...>
Languages like Scheme have their own standards (RNRS, IEEE Scheme, SRFI, ...).
It's perfectly fine to make a difference between Lisp and Scheme, for example. In the Scheme literature "Lisp" often means the earlier&older language before Scheme. A language which emphasizes symbols, property lists on symbols, lists, imperative programming, several namespaces, dynamic binding, ... Common Lisp, even though it is younger than Scheme, preserves the Lisp features from before Scheme. Other Lisp languages, like Emacs Lisp and ISLisp, are also backwards compatible.
There is also an idea of a wider family of Lisp-inspired languages, but that has very little practical meaning because they are often very different languages: Logo, Dylan, Racket, Clojure, newLisp, Hy, LispE, ... JavaScript, R, ...
If Scheme is a Lisp dialect, then it is a Lisp. This is commonly how the word is used. You may prefer the more narrow and prescriptive definition you've provided, that's fine I suppose, but as a matter of descriptive linguistics, it is common to refer to Scheme as such as well.
Lisp dialect? Sure, long ago. Now Scheme is its own language. It's like the uncle who now no longer lives in Germany and speaks no longer German, but lives in England where they speak a Germanic Language, called English, which again has its own dialects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages English has its roots in old Common Germanic (no joke, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language). Here we have the difference between Germanic and German. It's basically the same between the Lisp family ("Lispic") and Lisp.
There are many other places where authors in the Scheme literature have emphasized the difference between (original) Lisp and Scheme. They tell for example how things are done in Scheme vs. Lisp.
The SICP foreword says "Lisp changes. The Scheme dialect used in this text has evolved from the original Lisp and differs from the latter in several important ways, including static scoping for variable binding and permitting functions to yield functions as values."
If there are enough of these changes then Scheme begins to be its own language family.
Kent Pitman once has explained this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/H...
Typical user question: "should I learn Lisp or Scheme?", answer from Kent: "learn both".
then he explains:
"Others divide up this space differently than I, but for most purposes, I personally regard them as distinct langauges, not mere dialectal variations, although plainly they are from what I would call the same language family."
That's my view also.
The difference once has been described like this:
Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious."
Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs."
:)
One can write (mapcar (function (lambda (...) ...)) ...), but the (dolist (...) ...) is still there. Even PROG is still there.
For Scheme code needed to be rewritten, especially since Scheme changed more: syntax, different macro system, different control flow, different control flow abstractions, less built-in features, old features added back by libraries, ...
I've been meaning to finally figure out LISP, I'd be willing to use this as an excuse!
This is partially because it uses an existing language, rather than a home grown language. Guix was also my entry point for learning Lisp, and the abundance of learning material for the language will probably always dwarf that of Nixs homegrown language. I actually watched all of the SICP lectures; I found that to be an incredible resource to get my footing.
It's also important to note that Guixs documentation is readily available on the system using the GNU info utility, which if you're not familiar with, is like man but on steroids. If you use Kagi, I also made this lens[0] that allows one to search through the web version of the documentation, the mailing list archives, and the IRC logs all at once using !guix.
[0] https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8
SWHID is on its way to become an ISO standard[3]. OmniBOR is quite new but a highly interesting approach.
Because it does not directly solve any problems for Guix, it's fair enough that they do not talk about much about extrinsic identifiers except to rightfully dismiss CPE as "showing its limits", which is put mildly.
I think there is need for an extrinsic identifier standard beyond CPEs (in addition to intrinsic identifiers).
While intrinsic identifiers allow us to pinpoint artifacts exactly sometimes this is not what we want. Sometimes we deliberately want to talk about sets of artifacts together, like variants or versions of an artifact. One contender would be purl[4] (as in package URL and not the older persistent uniform resource locator).
[3] https://hal.science/hal-04121507v1/file/2023-03-27-SWHID-kic...
So binary artifacts should verifiably come from source code, which can be accomplished by signing it with a signing mechanism specified in the source code?
Bootstrapping everything from a tiny first stage compiler and getting bit-identical compiled outputs is a much higher level of confidence than PKI offers, as PKI can be cracked, stolen, made to sign things it shouldn't, etc. Even if the signature is legit, it doesn't help you against insider risk (e.g. internally added backdoors) on closed source software.
These are all things governments (should probably) care about.
It might not be a satisfying answer, but oh well. One can complain at Intel about it.