On 01/20/2013 11:46 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
Technically, I believe an EDSL has more to offer than a DSL with its own implementation: tooling (compiler, debugger, REPL, editor support, etc.), libraries (SRFI-1, etc.), general-purpose features (data structures, i18n, networking, etc.), and integration with other tools & libraries written in that language. Scheme makes it easy to define EDSLs, through macros.A nice thing is that Scheme can be used both on the “host” side (as a replacement of the Nix language), and on the build side (a nice replacement of Bash...).
Yes, I also agree that EDSL would be more suitable (I already wrote about this). It's absolutely essential for all of us to be able to share the nix store (I'm glad you do). Sharing the expressions would be very nice, but neither I can currently see a way to do this.
Personally, I don't like lisp derivatives, mainly because their macro-approach, only dynamic typing (and not very strong), not a very convenient syntax (unless you have a clever IDE), ...
I've thought about some kind of very-high-level "pre-processor", so that one would generate *nix* expressions to be built. I have no illusions that we can easily agree on one high-level language as a *replacement* of nix, so maximum sharing of nix expressions would IMO be very important.
Philosophically, I’m also interested in making a free software, and a “GNU” distro. I’ve always been disappointed that Nixpkgs includes non-free software, and that even proposals to just move them in a separate directory were rejected.
Oh dear. I *do* prefer free/libre SW to proprietary, but what good is to exclude the unfree stuff from nixkpgs. You have the license attribute, you can check it and now there's an option for doing it automatically [allowUnfree], I wouldn't even much mind it to be on by default. Splitting the packages to another directory tree would IMO be a bit confusing, the attribute seems a much better way.
For example, the free GPU drivers still IMHO aren't very good. I really don't agree with this RMS-style black&white view of the world (I *do* respect RMS for all he's done for free/libre SW).
[allowUnfree] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d9d9723ca72cd5eb658d5621e348dd5c5eeed8c6
Vlada
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
_______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
