My crush on GNU Guix

by Vagrant Cascadian
At: DebConf18
debconf18.debc...
GNU Guix is a build system... or is it a package manager... or an
operating system? Regardless of what angle you're looking at it with,
it brings a twinkle to my eye lately.
As a user, maintainer and developer of Debian for the past sixteen
years, I've tried various other Linux distributions but few really
seem to offer anything significantly different. Other distros have rarely
left me feeling the intense curiosity, excitement and maybe even a bit
of swooning that you might find with something genuinely new in your
life.
Some of the exciting features of GNU Guix include functional package
management, reproducibile builds by design, trivial container and
virtual machine instantiation, transactional upgrades and rollbacks,
user specific package installation, and user customized
packages. There's even some configuration management built-in.
It's a relatively new, small developer community. They understand Free
Software in ways very similar to Debian. They're welcoming and make it
easy to contribute improvements and fixes large and small.
There are some rough spots, and I'll try not to glaze over them
despite my enthusiasm. The grumpy old sysadmin within will have some
thoughts to share as well.
Perhaps most exciting is that love and crushes are not exclusive;
Debian and GNU Guix can coexist concurrently on the same running
system, it just requires setting some reasonable expectations, and
being willing to work some things out now and then.
www.gnu.org/so...
Room: Yushan (玉山)
Scheduled start: 2018-08-03 11:00:00

[@Ateshtesh]

Is really exciting see a Debian developer talking about GNU Guix SD. I learn a lot with this speech. I hope this distribution can grow up faster! I'm just an user by now and is still hard for me to use it, but I hope to improve my use on it soon. Thank you for the video!

[@DebConfVideos]

Follow-up: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qpunnmCsh9uhfKM

[@0netom]

I wonder why did the presenter have issues with parenthesis. He was using Emacs, which already has built-in facilities to manipulate lisp code and there are mature Emacs packages, like paredit or recently parinfer-rust-mode, lispy, etc, which make it a pleasure to edit many kinds of lisp code, including Scheme. in fact it's a lot easier to edit lisp code with those tools, than editing other languages with generic editing features. there is also the expand-region Emacs package, which helps a great deal with editing many programming languages, including lisps.

[@senantiasa]

Wow, I didn't expect the conference to be packed full of people!! I really feel sorry for those who had to stand up throughout the lecture...

[@littlemeg137]

If you're having problems with parens in Lisp/Scheme, your editor is not properly configured.