My crush on GNU Guix
Channel: DebConf Videos
Date: 2018-08-04

by Vagrant Cascadian

At: DebConf18
https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/99-my-crush-on-gnu-guix/

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.

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

Room: Yushan (玉山)
Scheduled start: 2018-08-03 11:00:00