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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to Docker which also bundles everything, or Go which basically statically links everything?

And what if your goal is to distribute software to users that may be running any arbitrary OS? You can't tell them "install Guix, learn how to use it, then use Guix to install my app". You'll lose a lot of users that way.

At the end of the day, users care most about getting stuff done. I am the author of a popular app that is written in C++ and uses Boost. Many users literally begged me to bundle Boost because installing Boost is so much of a pain for them.

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>As opposed to Docker which also bundles everything, or Go which basically statically links everything?

Yes, you've identified a bad trend. I am trying to raise awareness to stop it.

>And what if your goal is to distribute software to users that may be running any arbitrary OS? You can't tell them "install Guix, learn how to use it, then use Guix to install my app". You'll lose a lot of users that way.

You can actually use Guix to export the closure of the build and distribute that, if that's your thing. We do this for Guix itself to greatly simplify the installation process for new users, though for your use-case there would be some adjustment needed. The resulting binary distribution would work on any GNU/Linux system. Nix additionally offers OS X support. But yes, not everyone's use-case can be covered by Guix right now, but I strongly feel it's the direction we should be moving in.

Sounds interesting, I'm familiar with Nix, but not Guix. The core tenets of Nix really resonate with me, and you're 100% right in your parent post: this does not solve dependency management. It is a hack which trades long term reliability for short term stability and ease of installation.

It is not The Answer, it's just an answer until we (and I'm glad to see there are people like yourself on the case) can do better.

Well, first of all, this isn't about user acquisition. It's about solving technical problems.

Linking strategy is a totally orthogonal concern to package management, though I prefer static linking myself for not having to deal with the broader issues of the shared library namespace.

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