Re: [OT, deeply] Guix
Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I haven't read that article, but here's my opinion: I would
> love to see Debian move towards a model like that of NixOS
> or Guix. One of the main benefits I see of those systems is
> that it has a declarative description of what the system
> should contain.
>
> Think of it this way: currently, you can more or less figure
> out which packages you decided to install on your machine by
> going through the list of installed packages and filtering
> out all those that are marked as "automatically" installed.
>
> But you can only manipulate this list indirectly, via `apt
> install` and `apt remove`.
>
> In contrast, with NixOS/Guix that list is available in
> a plain text editable file. And in order to add a package or
> remove a package you can edit that list and then say
> something akin to "make" which will add/remove the needed
> packages to bring the system to the state described in
> the file.
>
> Another, slightly more subtle, benefit is that you'll always
> get the same system state from a given description.
> In contrast, with Debian, I have several Debian `testing`
> machines on which I have installed and removed over the
> years the same set of packages, but not exactly in the same
> order, and with a different interleaving of `apt upgrade`,
> and the result is that they don't all have exactly the same
> packages installed, and some suffer from problems that
> I don't see in the others.
100% correct ... that word, "declarative", to me, this is the
normal way of doing things. You can change the volume maybe up
1% or down 1% with (interactive) shell commands but for any
sufficiently big system - and it doesn't have to be that big -
it should have a config file of settings and a config files of
keys and a config file of extensions. At least!
And determinism from there - of course but OK, nonetheless ...
--
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal
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