[Nix-dev] GNU Guix 0.1 released (alpha)

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 01/20/2013 11:46 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Technically, I believe an EDSL has more to offer than a DSL with its own
> implementation: tooling (compiler, debugger, REPL, editor support,
> etc.), libraries (SRFI-1, etc.), general-purpose features (data
> structures, i18n, networking, etc.), and integration with other tools &
> libraries written in that language.  Scheme makes it easy to define
> EDSLs, through macros.
>
> A nice thing is that Scheme can be used both on the “host” side (as a
> replacement of the Nix language), and on the build side (a nice
> replacement of Bash...).

Yes, I also agree that EDSL would be more suitable (I already wrote 
about this). It's absolutely essential for all of us to be able to share 
the nix store (I'm glad you do). Sharing the expressions would be very 
nice, but neither I can currently see a way to do this.

Personally, I don't like lisp derivatives, mainly because their 
macro-approach, only dynamic typing (and not very strong), not a very 
convenient syntax (unless you have a clever IDE), ...

I've thought about some kind of very-high-level "pre-processor", so that 
one would generate *nix* expressions to be built. I have no illusions 
that we can easily agree on one high-level language as a *replacement* 
of nix, so maximum sharing of nix expressions would IMO be very important.


> Philosophically, I’m also interested in making a free software, and a
> “GNU” distro.
>
> I’ve always been disappointed that Nixpkgs includes non-free software,
> and that even proposals to just move them in a separate directory were
> rejected.

Oh dear. I *do* prefer free/libre SW to proprietary, but what good is to 
exclude the unfree stuff from nixkpgs. You have the license attribute, 
you can check it and now there's an option for doing it automatically 
[allowUnfree], I wouldn't even much mind it to be on by default. 
Splitting the packages to another directory tree would IMO be a bit 
confusing, the attribute seems a much better way.

For example, the free GPU drivers still IMHO aren't very good. I really 
don't agree with this RMS-style black&white view of the world (I *do* 
respect RMS for all he's done for free/libre SW).


[allowUnfree] 
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d9d9723ca72cd5eb658d5621e348dd5c5eeed8c6


Vlada


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