I have wanted to try out some Rust applications in the last weeks. Usually, when I want to try out programs in Guix, I install them directly or create a package for them. But not for programs written in Rust. The Rust ecosystem makes it easy to reuse code, and developers use it excessively. Because of this, packaging such programs is no fun at all.
It is a long article covering a bunch of things. But I’ll try to cover the items in the comments.
GUIX puts things in different location, making it incompatible with fhs standard. This important for guix to be able to implement its core features, namely these TWO
The problem for the “consumer” here happens when they try to drop a binary they download from the internet and it fails to run because:
The article covers two solutions for this problem: the first is patchelf (but is only meaningful for link loader and libs) and the second is to run inside a container (guix shell --container --emulate-fhs). I should note here the container solution is not that different from e.g. flatpak or similar.
Now for my personal (and very biased) opinion. I do like that guix enforces this and that random binaries from the internet don’t simply run here.
Historically distros packaged software for various reasons - but one side effect of this is that package maintainers (i.e. your distro volunteers) vetted changes/updates, tested new releases and reported issues upstream (or patched it). For me this is an important part of Linux distros not being a monoculture.
Finally on a hopeful note. I don’t think this is insurmountable. The article mentions two things that already exist 1) guix packages that wrap binaries in containers and 2) guix import that does auto imports for libraries. In principle there could be a tool that glues these two to automate it but this will probably happen in one of the projects that packages binaries (nonguix probably).
Right, yeah, so there’s occasionally a bit more jumping through hoops, but the end result is a much more manageable system where eg. updating thing X won’t clobber the fuck out of dependencies that thing Y needed, and in general you get a more “containerised” setup with a declarative way to set it up?
What’s the upside of Guix vs Nix (except eg. the syntax that @tetris11@lemmy.ml mentioned)?
There’s also the fully reproducible build starting from a 357 byte seed file (cpu-specific) + guile library, to generate a full blown fully reproducible OS
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
Huh. Not only is that pretty neat from a nerdy “they did what?” perspective, having a fully reproducible OS setup is definitely very useful in many contexts. No surprise that the first blog post of that series references the classic Thompson Reflections on Trusting Trust paper about his cc backdoor
Yeah, that trusting trust paper really opened my eyes on how compiler development works through a series of hacks