> This comes at a cost, of course: Guix has fever Java packages because of that, but those that it has are actually built from source.
Truly this is much more valuable than actually being able to use the software.
Truly this is much more valuable than actually being able to use the software.
Also for clojure heads the Nonguix[1] repository includes a leiningen package.
I think as time goes on and guix matures we will start to see more third party repositories that provide convenient builds of things. For instance I run guix system on a 2015 Chromebook Pixel and to do that I used the installation image provided at Nonguix to make sure I had all of the nonfree drivers I needed.
That's right, but 13,800 packages is not exactly bad. I believe that is more packages than Ubuntu had a few years ago.
While freedom zero (the most important!) is the ability "to use the software" - being able to improve, patch and adapt the software is also very important!
If it were that simple, why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.
It is that simple.
> why would we need package managers at all? Sadly, the Linux community as a whole have dedicated themselves to a structure that makes this seemingly simple task remarkably difficult.
Because there's a huge difference between a user downloading/running a binary, and software package management in an OS. The former is not maintainable, your binaries will be out of date soon, etc. But, if you insist on wanting to do this, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it. Have fun.
I really do want to do this, precisely because the software in the repo is often out of date, if it is even there at all! I really don't like the idea of a mandatory middleman between the developer and the user.
And since I really do want to do this, and do it often, I can say with quite a bit of certainty that
> It is that simple.
Is complete and utter bullshit! Sometimes you get lucky and the developer produces AppImages or a static binary, sometimes you're less lucky and have to grab the binary and its dependencies and write a startup script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH, sometimes you're even less lucky than that and get to use patchelf to force it to use a compatible ld.so, but most of the time you end up having to compile the damn thing from source like it is 1975.
And if package managers really solved the problem, why do so many projects deploy with Docker? Why do FlatPak and Snap exist, let alone my preferred AppImage?
Guix allows you to easily write own package definitions which are treated as part of the whole system. If you submit them and they are accepted, they simply become part of Guix.
> why must said repo prevent me from installing older versions,
Precisely this is a case that Guix solves extremely well: One can start environments with specific versions of packages, like in Pyhon's virtualenv.
And by the way, the complexity is caused by the issue that many many components need to fit together. That does not happen by chance, it is a massive amount of work to make it fit in a manageable way, and check that it works. That's what distributions do.
That depends much on the distribution you use (if recentness is most important, why do you don't use Arch), and being out of date is definitely not the case for Guix System:
http://distrowatch.org/dwres.php?firstlist=guixsd&firstversi...
Sp, why are you bringing an argument that does not apply to Guix?