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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Is there a...non official repository of these somewhere?

There are a smattering of code snippets around

This[1] is the one I used as a reference for my kernel build which includes brcmfmac

There is also a feature called 'channels' (not widely documented AFAIK) which allows you to describe an outside repository of code you can reference to install packages. There is one[2] that provides Chromium (though I cannot get the build to succeed).

The downside to all of these not being provided in mainline is the amount of time and energy to build them. I suspect there are more people than I would like curating their build of the linux kernel, manually specifying drivers included in the kernel. I really wish the community were a little less hard-set on the principle of 'freedom' and a little more pragmatic; I am sure the community is smaller due to people being turned away at the sheer amount of effort required to get their machine to a usable state.

[1]: https://github.com/wingo/guix-nonfree [2]: https://gitlab.com/mbakke/guix-chromium

^ I stand corrected: My WiFi (ath10k) WOULD probably work...

As someone who is sympathetic to their cause and their stance, I think the extreme position of excluding all non-free software can actually hamper the movement by making it less accessible to people. I get you always have to draw a line somewhere, but FSF draw it too firmly.

> you always have to draw a line somewhere, but FSF draw it too firmly.

They actually don't draw it exactly where I would. I don't care so much for games if they're open/free or not (it's nice when they are of course), but I am concerned with unauditable code on, for instance, the SATA controllers in my machine, even if it 'read only' code. Where the FSF is more concerned with the first and less with the second.

On the other topic, I think the ability to create (and share) your own recipes/channels for software on Guix allows for people to create fairly easy ways to install non-free software (or using Nix on top of GuixSD) without the Guix team having to support unethical software.

None that I know of currently. The OS is version 0.15.0. It's very young and doesn't have a huge user base. I'm sure there will be non gnu repositories that will eventually spring up. I've even toyed with the idea of setting one up.

Even as a toy example, a blog post and code that demonstrates setting up a 3rd-party package repository would be helpful. I'm just afraid of the GUIX team deciding they don't want to support 3rd-party repos because it encourages non-free software use, and deliberately stonewalling development of related features.

Guix has had support for external package definitions for a long time (via GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH) and recently gained a channels feature, which makes this even easier.

At the institute where I work we use this feature to provide package variants that aren't going to be added to Guix proper (e.g. because they are no longer supported upstream or because they are only useful on obscure systems).

This mechanism can be used to include package definitions for non-free software, of course, but this doesn't mean that the Guix project encourages the use of non-free software.

You have the freedom to package up and use non-free software, but we won't make them part of Guix, build them on our build farms, and we won't hold back changes to the mechanism even if that might break 3rd-party collections of non-free software.

You don't really need a blog post about how to set up a package repository, because it's right there in the Guix manual.

PS: It's "Guix", not "GUIX" ;)

Thanks for the reply. As long as it's easy to mix free and non-free packages at my discretion, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Also, thank you for the capitalization correction. It grinds my gears when people capitalize things unnecessarily and I wouldn't want to be one of them!

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