Re: Introducing GNU Guix

[Adam Spiers]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Brandon Invergo <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Is Stow still useful, or should we think of Guix as a replacement for it?
>
> I personally use it to manage my home-directory config files
> ("dotfiles") so I can have them all sorted nicely by application and
> under version control in one directory and then only stow the ones I
> need into their proper places.

That's exactly my use case too:

    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-stow/2011-12/msg00000.html

It's the reason I took over maintainership after Stow had become
stagnant and not made a public release for many years.

> I do also use it to manage alternate builds of some software, so that
> only one build is installed at a time, and I do so alongside the
> systems' package managers. For technological reasons, those systems
> can't be moved to a Guix-based distribution any time soon (they're
> ARM-based systems), and I don't relish the thought of having two
> full-blown package managers residing side-by-side on the same
> system. Having Stow available as a "light" package manager for limited
> usage is actually really handy.
>
> Please don't deprecate it :)

I have no intention of letting it die as long as I rely on it :)  But I
would love to see a rewrite happen in a modern language at some point.

> Though, I do agree with modifying how we refer to it (as a "symlink
> farm" rather than as a "package manager for people who don't use package
> managers").
>
> Incidentally, GARStow, the system from which GSRC is derived, uses Stow
> to do its symlinking. GSRC does it manually, but I have entertained the
> thought of changing it to use Stow instead.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of this "customer".