abstract:
I know nothing about Guix. This file exists to record my learning experience.
The plan is to be able to install Guix on debian, then load a reproducible configuration file so that I can instantly and reproducibly produce a host setup the way I want it. (Which nix, lacking its own init system, cannot quite do, because one always wants to run services.)
Guix is primarily a package manager with a declarative functional language as its package manager.
Which makes it possible to reproducibly create a setup. Unfortunately the packages are hard to customise, because access to the configuration files is restricted and non trivial – you have to derive your own package from an existing package
Guix solves the problem of dll hell by having any number of configurations living on the same machine – which leads to massive and rapid accumulation of garbage. Garbage collection is very slow, and requires either a lot of ram or a lot of swap (12GB swap recommended. This is a feature I do not want, but wind up suffering, for the advantage of reproducible setups.
To avoid bloat, can use a strategy of re-install from scratch, which Guix makes less painful.
“With Guix System, you declare all aspects of the operating system configuration and Guix takes care of instantiating the configuration in a transactional, reproducible, and stateless fashion (see System Configuration).”
A Guix package is a pure function, which generates the install
as directory identified by its hash in /gnu/store and then a symbolic link
in the users directory references the package by human readable name, analogous
to git having branch names that point to commits.
Which is great if you have a lot of users each of which might want a different version of software, but I want to install stuff that will run under the init system, Shepherd.
The package manager is a great pile of such pure functions, but if you want to install stuff that is fully configured the way you want it configured, you are going to have to derive a packages from an existing package
The Guix install system, Shepherd, cannot be a pure function, there can only be one http service, one wireguard service, and so forth. It has to be the escape hatch that makes a purely functional system actually do things by not being a purely functional system, akin to Haskell Monads, an isolated piece of procedural code that make all the purely functional code actually do something.
not yet begun
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