Planet Guix

The first Freenode #live conference happened on the weekend just passed (28th and 29th of October), and it was awesome but exhausting.

I’ve been working with Ruby professionally for over 3 years now and I’ve grown frustrated with two of its most popular development tools: RVM and Bundler. For those that may not know, RVM is the Ruby version manager and it allows unprivileged users to download, compile, install, and manage many versions of Ruby instead of being stuck with the one that is installed globally by your distro’s package manager. Bundler is the tool that allows developers to keep a version controlled “Gemfile” that specifies all of the project’s dependencies and provides utilities to install and update those gems. These tools are crucial because Ruby developers often work with many applications that use different versions of Ruby and/or different versions of gems such as Rails. Traditional GNU/Linux distributions install packages to the global /usr directory, limiting users to a single version of Ruby and associated gems, if they are packaged at all. Traditional package management fails to meet the needs of a lot of users, so many niche package managers have been developed to supplement them.

Take any software project, on its own its probably not very useful. First of all, you probably need a complier or interpreter, something to directly run the software, or convert the source form (preferred form for editing), to a form which can be run by the computer.

If you’re a software developer, then you probably know very well that setting up a project’s development environment for the first time can be a real pain. Installing all of the necessary dependencies using your system’s package manager can be very tedious. To "solve" this problem, we have resorted to inventing new package managers and dependency bundlers for pretty much every programming language. Ruby has rubygems and bundler, Python has pip and virtualenv, PHP has composer, node.js has npm, and so on. Wouldn’t it be nice to instead have a single package manager that can handle it all? Enter GNU Guix, a purely functional package manager and GNU/Linux distribution. Using Guix, you can easily create a development environment for any software project using the guix environment tool.

I have spent some of the last month working on contributing to GNU Guile and now I can finally say that I have contributed code to the project. Guile has several hash table implementations: a Guile native one, SRFI-69, and R6RS. SRFI-69 contains a handy procedure, alist->hash-table, which allows for a sort of hash literal-like syntax:

Over the weekend, I decided to try out GNU Guix: A fully functional package manager based on Nix and a distribution of the GNU system. I’m a big proponent of GNU Guile, thus I was excited to see a DSL for package management written with Guile.