"Garreau, Alexandre" <[email protected]> writes: > But the Hurd is still at development level, and the current try (there > were —and several still exists— others: GSRC, swbis, stow, etc.) of GNU > distribution of GNU is GNU Guix
Just to clarify this, as it's a point of confusion (for myself as well, in the beginning), these projects all do very different things. Only Guix has set out from the beginning to be a full-blown, proper package management system for GNU that is robust enough to base a distro on it. - GSRC: while based on a source-based package management system (GAR and the GARstow extensions), GSRC is not meant to be a package management system itself. It's simply meant to be a convenient means for installing GNU (and only GNU) software. When I first took over maintainership of it, I had some misguided ideas of basing a source-based distro on it. I'm glad I didn't, because Guix is a better solution for that, and anyway it would have been outside the original purview of the project. To that end, I removed 3rd party packages from GSRC and I now instruct the user to install the packages via their distro's package manager. - swbis: the main role of swbis is for system administrators to easily install software on network machines that they administer. It *would* be possible, I think, to base a distro on it, but you would really have to twist the tools to do something they weren't meant to do. For example, the user needs ssh access on any system involved, including the repository of software you would want to pull from, which doesn't make much sense for a distro. Also, the commands have a pretty baroque usage, which would not be ideal for someone managing their own system who just wants to install and uninstall things. Nevertheless, I've played around with packaging my software with swbis, to be downloaded via http and managed locally via swbis. It has some nice features, but it's not really a package management system in the sense that most people think of. - stow: stow is awesome and I'm a huge fan of it, but again, it's not a package management system in the usual sense. It *can* be used to conveniently manage locally built and installed software, but it only would handle the ultimate step: putting all the installed bits in the right place in a sane way. Everything before that (downloading, unpacking, configuring, building, and DESTDIR installing) is handled manually by the user. - sourceinstall: now retired in favor of Guix and GSRC, sourceinstall was a means of automating installation of packages that are distributed with the standard GNU build system (or some facsimile of it: as long as it supports configure && make && make install). Again, this wouldn't make a solid foundation for a full distro, especially since not all software uses the GNU standard build system, but it was simply a means of managing locally installed software on top of an existing system. I hope that clears it up. -brandon -- Brandon Invergo http://brandon.invergo.net
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