Dub, Cargo, Go, Gradle, Maven

[John Gabriele]

On Thursday, 15 February 2018 at 16:47:35 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 February 2018 at 15:52:41 UTC, John Gabriele 
> wrote:
>> It's a bit confusing since the first thing [the Guix 
>> webpage](https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/) talks about 
>> "GuixSD", rather than the Guix tool in its own right.
>
> Yes. We discussed that at the hackathon before FOSDEM. It is 
> rather difficult to position a project that has so many use 
> cases...
>
>> Wow, I didn't realize how established Guix is. It's [packages 
>> page](https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/) boasts 6868 
>> available packages!
>
> ~2000 added in the last year. I am updating the ldc package to 
> 1.7.0 this week.
>
>> Are any other languages using Guix for their 3rd-party online 
>> package repo? If not, why?
>
> GNU Guile ;).

That's excellent. I remember years ago it looked like there was 
action in getting a Guile package repo going but it never panned 
out. Glad they found (and settled on) something! (Though 
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/> doesn't say 
anything about Guix, and I don't see anything about Guix in the 
[Guile 
manual](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/master/guile.html/)).

> The current state is that everyone is rolling out some type of 
> language support. The good news is that Guix allows for 
> abstracting existing build systems. If you look at a typical 
> python package you can see it leans on pip:
>
>   
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/python.scm#n1004
>
> The package is written in Guile scheme, but you can see it does 
> not take a genius
> to package something. In fact Guix can generate the actual 
> package definition automatically.
>
> We have not written something similar for dub. But I can do 
> that if there is interest.

I'd love to see an overview article explaining how the pieces 
would fit together. Would Guix work with Dub? If so, what 
specifically (on GNU/Linux) would be required to make that 
happen, and what would using such a solution look like in 
practice?

>> Not at all. Seems like an amazing tool!
>
> Agree. Give it a shot.

I don't yet know enough about D and Dub to even know what giving 
Guix a shot would mean :). I'm on Debian and so use apt for 
installing software. I'll have to spend some time with the Guix 
(and Dub) docs.

> It does not hurt your system because the installer only uses 
> /gnu (for the software) and /var/guix (for the database). To 
> uninstall simply remove those dirs.
> Guix never overwrites system directories.

Nice. Easy removal is most appreciated.