forked from cheng/wallet
62 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
62 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title:
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Guix and Shepherd
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sidebar: true
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misc_links: >-
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<a href="set_up_build_environments.md" target="_blank">Set up build environments</a><br>
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abstract: >-
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I know nothing about Guix. This file exists to record my learning
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experience.\
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\
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The plan is to be able to install Guix on debian, then load a reproducible
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configuration file so that I can instantly and reproducibly produce a
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host setup the way I want it. (Which nix, lacking its own init
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system, cannot quite do, because one always wants to run services.)
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...
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Guix is primarily a package manager with a declarative functional language
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as its package manager.
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Which makes it possible to reproducibly create a setup.
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Unfortunately the packages are hard to customise,
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because access to the
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configuration files is restricted and non trivial -- you have to derive your own package from an existing package
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Guix solves the problem of dll hell by having any number of configurations living on the same machine --
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which leads to massive and rapid accumulation of garbage.
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Garbage collection is very slow, and requires either a lot of ram or a lot of swap (12GB swap recommended.
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This is a feature I do not want, but wind up suffering, for the advantage of reproducible setups.
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To avoid bloat, can use a strategy of re-install from scratch, which Guix makes less painful.
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"With Guix System, you declare all aspects of the operating system configuration and Guix takes care of
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instantiating the configuration in a transactional, reproducible, and stateless fashion
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(see [System Configuration](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/System-Installation.html))."
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# What Guix is
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A Guix package is a pure function, which generates the install
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as directory identified by its hash in `/gnu/store` and then a symbolic link
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in the users directory references the package by human readable name, analogous
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to git having branch names that point to commits.
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Which is great if you have a lot of users each of which might want a different
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version of software, but I want to install stuff that will run under
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the init system, Shepherd.
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The package manager is a great pile of such pure functions,
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but if you want to install stuff that is fully configured the way you want it configured,
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you are going to have to derive a packages from an existing package
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The Guix install system, Shepherd, cannot be a pure function, there can only be one http service,
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one wireguard service, and so forth. It has to be the escape hatch that makes a purely functional
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system actually do things by not being a purely functional system, akin to Haskell Monads,
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an isolated piece of procedural code that make all the purely functional code actually do something.
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# Install Guix and Shepherd
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not yet begun
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