After Seven Years, The Gnu Project Releases GNU Guix 1.0.0 (gnu.org) 86
An anonymous reader quotes LWN.net:
Version 1.0.0 of the GNU Guix package manager has been released. "This 1.0 release is a major milestone for Guix. It represents 7 years of hard work with more than 40,000 commits by 260 people, 19 releases, and an equally amazing amount of work on documentation, translation, artwork, web design, mentoring, outreach, and many other activities that together have made it a thriving project." See this blog entry for more information.
From the announcement: Whether you're a software developer, a user, or a free software enthusiast, we hope GNU Guix will provide you with the tools to deploy and manage software with confidence and ease, qualities that are not usually associated with software deployment...
GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.
From the announcement: Whether you're a software developer, a user, or a free software enthusiast, we hope GNU Guix will provide you with the tools to deploy and manage software with confidence and ease, qualities that are not usually associated with software deployment...
GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.
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No, and the standalone version is sporting the init system developed for HURD. It's well on track to dominate the desktop space by 2050.
Is this like the Hurd? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, other than the fact that this seems to have an actually usable release. However I never heard of this project before.
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And how many people are running the Gnu operating system?
RMS would say "a lot." To him, anyone using a substantial number of Gnu tools with a $kernel kernel is running a $kernel-based Gnu system.
Re:Is this like the Hurd? (Score:5, Interesting)
RMS would say "a lot." To him, anyone using a substantial number of Gnu tools with a $kernel kernel is running a $kernel-based Gnu system.
Unfortunately for him Linux is the dog in hot dogs, nobody mentions the bun or mustard, ketchup, relish, mayo, onions etc. explicitly even if GNU made all the condiments and garnishes. More concerning for RMS is probably that the (L)GPL is in retreat [whitesourcesoftware.com], it's MIT and Apache 2.0 that is trending. With the trend of moving essential bits to online services, the cloud etc. this is maybe not so surprising, if you're not distributing it you're not triggering the GPL anyway and proprietary kernel drivers and other kinds of service wrappers seem to work around it in practice. And if not they'll just build a parallel infrastructure that's more permissive like LLVM vs GCC. Today you can get most things done without GNU, if you want to...
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Stallman sees Linux as the bun and GNU as the hot dog.
I think Stallman would see Gnu as the menu and Linux as the waiter/busboy.
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Unfortunately for him Linux is the dog in hot dogs
Oh, this is a good analogue. I'm going to start calling them "hot dog sandwiches."
history according to Magic Woke Powder (Score:2)
Stallman believes that his politics are transitive, but yours aren't (not unless your politics equate or align to his politics).
If you remove the cult of personality from the equation, GNU was an early re-implementation of BSD, which was the original non-commercial fork of AT&T's original research Unix. Developing the GNU Compiler Collection was a hellacious amount of
Re:Apt is very good... they need more selling poin (Score:5, Funny)
Systemd will be taking over package management in the next revision of Ubuntu/Debian. Apt will be replaced by a new systemctl command, which you'll use to submit a request to install a new package. If systemd approves the installation request, your package will then be installed within the next 24 hours, a feature called 'lazy installation' which prevents package installations from using valuable system resources.
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Re: Apt is very good... they need more selling poi (Score:3)
Considering that the success of Ubuntu came from allowing users of apt to easily install nonfree software, and that Ubuntu is the market leader in the server space, I think it is fair to say that apt is one of the most important pieces of software ever written.
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Also, it doesn't matter, but they have the best artwork I've seen in any GNU project [gnu.org]. What happened to GNU?
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That, of course, is the big question. Can it handle deb repositories? rpm repositories? Whatever Slackware uses? Gentoo? Each answer of *yes* is a really big plus, but if you don't have any, then it means they need to build their own repositories. Perhaps their idea is that it should entirely be used on top of a system maintained by another package manager, but that doesn't look viable to me.
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More than that, if all the answers are "no" they would be asking every software vendor in the universe to repackage their stuff for this management system nobody uses. Nobody wants to do that unless they get to jettison one or more of the ones they currently support.
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Universal standard... (Score:2)
Let's over react... (Score:2, Informative)
And minimize the effort of a group of intelligent, driven individuals!
If you read the description of what Guix can do it actually solves some problems that aren't as trivial as managing a systems packages and dependencies. It's like git, dpkg and rolled into one. And that's just the beginning.
I'm impressed and excited to use it, because I wouldn't have even thought to wish for something as feature rich and useful as Guix.
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Copyleft is enforced with copyright, which is not very "capitalist" - at least, not in the free market sense. There's nothing about a government-granted monopoly in the free market capitalism playbook.
So its a package manager AND an OS? (Score:3, Funny)
Do the Emacs guys know yet? They're gonna be pissed!
Seriously, yet another package manager. I'm sure its great but I can't be bothered to learn another one. They're used once in a while to install software, the end. I have better things to spend my time on.
As for it being a standalone OS distro - umm, why? There's feature creep and then there's just bloody absurd.
Re: So its a package manager AND an OS? (Score:2)
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Quoting Tron:
Dr Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for!
Re:So its a package manager AND an OS? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure its great but I can't be bothered to learn another one. They're used once in a while to install software, the end.
To be fair it sounds like it has some quite nice features for creating machine configs and rolling out standard sets of packages across multiple machines. Looks useful if you need to configure a lot of VMs etc.
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Ansible, Puppet, Salt etc. all suck in one way or another. Either the community version isn't well-supported, or they depend on Python, or they're defective in some other way.
And nothing of value was gained (Score:1)
Re: And nothing of value was gained (Score:1)
You've gained another word nobody knows how pronounce. Is the G silent? Is it like GUI-X? It's bad enough people are still saying ARMv7 when they mean ARM 32-bit and AArch64 when thy mean ARM 64-bit which is also ARMv8. Obfuscated English is worse than obfuscated code.
AE911Truth Org
is it: the question everyone is asking (Score:1)
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Yes, but it doesn't matter. systemd is going to require a hardcoded dependency on systemd-package for all software that wants to run in systemd/Linux.
GNOME ? (Score:3)
No thanks!
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Actually, the info pages are terrible...unless you are in a text based environment. For a desktop system they should automatically redirect to *LOCAL* html pages with equivalent content.
That said, if you're in a text based environment, then the main problem with info pages is that they aren't always there, and if they are there, they aren't always up-to-date. Because nearly nobody uses them. (So the html pages and the info pages need to be one automatically generated from the other, and the html needs t
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Yes, but then consider the alternatives. The info pages went into a lot more depth than did the man pages. Granted, they seemed to assume you were using EMACS.
Hackable! (Score:3)
From the web site: "Hackable. It provides Guile Scheme APIs"
Yay, we can all go searching for scheme bindings.
Still whining that "it's just a kernel" over there (Score:3)
"... running the kernel Linux..."
They're still all pedants at GNU about referring to Linux as a kernel and just can't accept that it has become the shorthand for Linux kernel based operating system. I suppose they still make photostatic electrically charged powder transfer and fused duplicates of papers over there too. (You know, because calling something a photocopy wouldn't be accurate enough.)
At least that's what this Linux user believes.
It's really interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Every distro could use a transactional package manager. It makes it trivial to back out a change that messes up your system, and then to inspect what went wrong. This also builds stand-alone environments on command, builds partitions for software containers, builds archives to provision a bare system, and builds images for bootstrapping hardware.
Their distro is also interesting in that it bootstraps from source, and packages are source (of course, this is the GNU project). They have a program called Mes that bootstraps a scheme interpreter, runs a C compiler written in Scheme, bootstraps TinyCC from source using that, and then bootstraps GNU C. This so far runs on a kernel, but they are discussing how to run it on bare hardware and bootstrap the kernel from source.
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Every distro could use a transactional package manager. It makes it trivial to back out a change that messes up your system, and then to inspect what went wrong. This also builds stand-alone environments on command, builds partitions for software containers, builds archives to provision a bare system, and builds images for bootstrapping hardware.
Well... it makes sure the packages are in a consistent state, it doesn't mean the configuration/data is. For example, say I have a system where person and phone number is a 1:1 relation, we change it to be a 1:many relation. People start using this new version of the software and then uh-oh, we broke a report. Can we roll back to backups? Sure. Is there a downgrade script to bring us back? Ehhh... Can we store the multiple phone numbers somehow? No. Same thing with documents, you upgrade and users start sav
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The global configuration system is subject to roll-backs. I suspect this means the package configuration is ported to Guile Scheme, but I've not tried it.
Bug report (Score:3)
I would like to file a bug report on Guix:
What's expected: Ability to pronounce the name.
What's actually happening:
- Guy Ex
- Gooey Ex
- Goo-eeks
- Gee Yoo Aye Ex
- Like Quicks, but with a G instead of the Q
- Dafuq is dis
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OK, so none of the above. It's Geeks...
Works on other distros. (Score:2)
Guix is cool (so is nix). You can install it on other distros, like Android. I used it to install xWayland and IceCat on SailfishOS.
GuixSD is the thing (Score:2)
Let's look at the reviews (Score:2)
https://distrowatch.com/dwres-... [distrowatch.com]
Sounds terrible