Re: Guix on Debian (was: GSoC ideas)

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 04:32:30PM -0800, Diane Trout wrote:
> Also one of your other messages suggested the /gnu directory is also
> against Debian policy.
>
> If there's a way resolve those things, there's probably a much better
> chance to get it into Debian.
 
Yes, this in old discussion (also in Nix). For sure, if guix built in
/usr/local and $HOME it would be much easier to get by the policy
folks (also in HPC environments).

There is, however, a good reason to make it a blatant /gnu outside the
FHS. The store contains everything that normally goes into the full
FHS. It lives outside the FHS. If we make it part of the FHS (even in
one subdirectory) it would confuse things badly. I think the clarity
matters to system administrators AND users.

Also, for true reproducibility, we need one path. Arguably it could be
a different one, but to make sure a package is exactly the same in its
binary form it needs to be running from a root point.

It took me quite some time to come round to this idea. But now I am
really convinced it is the only way forward. Administrators can use
chroot and containers/VM to mount /gnu - so, there is no real
technical concern.

Guix is not tied to one server. If they think it important, the Debian
people can, at some point, decide to take Guix, create their own
caching server, and distribute /usr/local/guix. They have done far
more intrusive things ;)

For us acceptance in Debian is not a prime concern either. An
installable .deb package is good enough to help regular users.
Therefore I don't think you need to fix the binary bootstrapping as
long as we can make it part of the automated build farm.

> But other than that I think my postrm script is incomplete and
> certainly needs some more testing but this can certainly turn into
> .debs hosted by guix.
> 
> Diane

Thanks for the great work! A .deb package would be very useful for
people to start using Guix.

Pj.
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