Re: package manager guix on Windows and OSX

[Edouard Klein]

>
> Why Plan 9? May I ask?

Plan 9 is awesome. What the whole industry is barely managing to achieve
with containers and VMs, Guix does somewhat correctly with namespaces,
but Plan 9 had all this in its DNA, in a cleaner implementation 30
years ago !

By default, a process in Plan 9 only has a partial view of the system,
and is truly isolated from the other processes. No network, user,
filesytem namespace bullshit, everything (yes everything is a file), so
there is only one namespace, the filesystem namespace, and you mount
only what your process needs to see.

e.g . your process does not need to access the internet, then don't mount
/net !

e.t. your process need to access only one host: the connect to the host,
and mount the relevant /net/tcp/n/ directory, but not /net/tcp/clone,
and so your process will not be able to connect anywhere else !

Also, any file could be managed by a process running on another machine,
transparently.

Anyway, Guix reminds me of Plan9 because it achieves like 10% of what
Plan9 could do, but on a Kernel that actually runs on modern hardware,
and with a sane API, and so it's 10 times better than anything else. Yet
I wish Linux was more plan9ish.


> And I do really like the Hurd, but I use the
> dvorak keyboard layout.  My understanding is that the Hurd does not
> support variant keyboard layouts yet...  :(

I don't think that the kernel is the part where your keyboard layout is
implemented, but I don't know the Hurd at all so I may well 

>
> I actually think that the Guix developers may want to consider a port to
> the OpenBSD kernel, provided that the Hyperbola developers get
> HyperbolaBSD working.  Though I guess the Debian guys sort of did
> already.  :)

OpenBSD is really good too. The pledge() function is a really nice API
that is much easier to use than the mess we got on Linux...