Re: NLNet grant "Next Generation Internet -- Search & discovery": I'm in!

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Hi Tobias!

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <address@hidden> writes:

> Yay!  The second joyful announcement on guix-devel this week.

I see many joyful announcements! :p  So which was the first one?

>> 1. Parameterized packages
>>    (Previous discussion: 
>>    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-05/msg00285.html)
>>
>>    Gentoo’s package manager, Portage, exposes a “USE flags” 
>>    feature which allows
>>    users to customize packages in a way that composes 
>>    (e.g. “disable the GUI
>>    elements of all packages” for a headless server).  This 
>>    essentially subdivides
>>    packages into smaller “components.”  Since those components 
>>    form the smallest
>>    atoms a user could search for, this is a prerequisite for the 
>>    rest of the
>>    searchability improvements.
>
> Very curious to see where this goes.  Do you have any other 
> examples of distributions that attack this problem in (more) 
> interesting ways than Gentoo?

I'm not aware of any other USE-flag-like system beside Gentoo
derivatives like Funtoo.

> The inevitable “oooh, you mean like USE flags” mental 
> shortc(irc)ut that this subject inevitably triggers seems stifling 
> to me… but it affects me as well and I don't have any better 
> ideas.

Oh, it's no mental shortcut, I wrote "USE flags" explicitly! ;)

I've used Gentoo myself for a while and I have experience the USE-flags
nightmare first hand...  I'd hate to inflict this scourge onto Guix!
That said, I believe that the functional aspect of Guix + the
programming language can help us tremendously here.  We will see when
time comes to discuss this more in depth.

> Thank you, and good luck!

Thanks!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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