Guix

Sun Jun 9, 2019

So I've been looking into guix1, and it looks like it's basically everything I've ever wanted in a package manager.

It's like nix in the sense of reproducible builds and immutable package store, but it uses guile Scheme as the package definition language instead of some godawful, ad-hoc frankensteining of Haskell, Perl and Javascript. It also has a coherent distribution story, whether you're looking to distribute sofware to people who also use guix, or those who don't. The resulting builds can be reproducible, and can be formatted as tarballs or Docker images. This makes guix a decent candidate for general dev-ops needs, and I'm going to seriously consider doing something about this at my company.

My life's kind of upside-down at the moment, for reasons I may or may not end up ultimately blogging about, but when I finally scrape some time together, my plan is to replace nix in my machine-setup scripts, start deploying my blog using those packaging facilities I mentioned, and look into the possibility of using guix as a package manager for Standard ML. It looks like this would involve submitting pull requests to packages/sml.scm that mirror the packages/python-xyz.scm implementations of things. Except, you know, for SML rather than Python.

In other news, PolyHack TO finally posted my talk from last June. This is a shortened version of my Clojure North talk about stupid web games, so you can now get kind of an idea of how it would have gone without the massive, mid-talk flaming explosion. It's mildly surreal to see this talk up right now, because while its' only been a year, my life has taken enough weird turns that it feels more like ten. The Clojure North talk will not be coming to you in a neatly polished, YouTube-published video, but I may eventually post the raw audio/video somewhere for posterity.

As ever, I'll let you know how it all goes.

  1. Which I'm convinced is pronounced "geeks" for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. I read it somewhere but haven't confirmed yet, so I dunno; maybe it's complete horseshit?↩

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