Hi Hugo, Thanks for your kind words about my blog post!
> But more interestingly, the article also clarifies why I felt the need > for using genAI in Guix in the first place: the conviviality is already > largely lost. In my opinion, that depends on how you look at Guix, and what you consider an essential part of Guix. In particular: Is your Guix the package manager, the collection of packages in the main Guix channel, or the full system distribution? In the first case, Guix imposes very few constraints on what you can package. Make your own channel, add what you like, and publish it. In the second and third cases, the problem is that the Guix package collection, i.e. the main channel, includes highly non-convivial ecosystems, such as Python. They have become dependencies, and that means that the Guix channel can never be convivial. I'd love to see a convivial Guix variant that contains fewer packages carefully selected for stability. On top of that variant, we could have channels with various policies, including multiple channels for Python software, some going for bleeding-edge and others for occasional snapshots of the ecosystem that remain usable for years. With the current main channel, this is very hard to achieve because Python is already part of it. > In fact, we are doing *worse* than other ecosystems. Half of Konrad's > article is about the poor state of the Python world. Yet adding > packages to PyPI or conda feels far more convivial than adding them to > Guix! As Simon explained, PyPI and conda merely make it easier to add packages. For a convivial package system, that's not sufficient. In particular, both PyPI and conda make it very hard for users to compose the package versions of their choice. > Technically, I'm not limited at all; I could put everything I want in my > own channel. But Guix can be so much more than that. And we even > regularly break 3th party channels, forcing them to keep up or perish. > Arguably we are becoming the problem we set out to solve. What is the problem we set out to solve? Maybe we should start by defining it more clearly, and see if we actually agree on a common definition as a community. I suspect that we don't. > How exactly we should revive conviviality w.r.t. what we package would > be a collective exploration. If any operating system can do it, it is > us, because all the groundwork is there to keep old packages around. Yes, we could do that. But my feeling is that this is not the vision of most of the Guix community. Cheers, Konrad.
