This post will be about my totally beginner test of Guix. I do not claim any particular skill in the domain and I could be wrong and/or have bad assumptions.
So ..
.. why make a post?
Well, writing help me organize my though with multiple added bonus:
Other can react to it and claryfied part of my assumptions/errors
It can encourage other sharing their first step learning something new
.. what is Guix?
Guix is a functional packages manager. The goal of a package manager is to maintain and build softwares.
The claims of functional packages managers is that you can explicitly encapsulate all of the process to build a software in functions and get back an explicit environement. I am still one hundred percent not satisfied with that definition but I needed one to start!
The advantage should be that you could have more easily multiple environements and share them. This is useful in reproducible research but even at my small scale I clearly see the benefit to have a declarative tool that will help me in developement.
One aspiration goal should be to easily build GDAL and have environement pre and post the version 3.10.
What are the difference and benefit versus docker (or podman) and/or virtual environement? All of that are good questions that are also in my mind. I just started grasping it and hopefully would be able to have clear awnsers later.
..why not using Nix (the other functional package manager)?
Since I am beginner I have no idea if that would have been better, you need to s tart somewhere. I picked Guix because of the Licence, the use of Guile a Scheme implementation and the fact that researchers are working on it (other researchers are probaly also working in Nix, it could be just that I am not aware of it).
Hello World!
Issue I had on ubunutu 24.4
apparmor was blocking guix @baleine save me and I find this link: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/AppArmor-Support.html
Resources
https://learninglab.gitlabpages.inria.fr/mooc-rr/mooc-rr2-ressources/module2/seq6-functional_package_manager/unit1/unit1.1-lecture.html
https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/12/cran-a-practical-example-for-being-reproducible-at-large-scale-using-gnu-guix/
stuff for cURL: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/X_002e509-Certificates.html
I plan to continue exploring it and hopefully make more posts as I progress!