Package managers have been immensely successful in increasing the popularity of programming languages - think about Perl's CPAN or Ruby's Gem. But Guile doesn't a package manager, and that in my opinion slows down its adoption.
The Guix repos distribute a lot of useful Guile libraries (like guile-json or guile-opengl) which can't be found on most distro repositories and it already provides Guile APIs and package management capabilities...my question is, can Guix be forked into a full-blown Guile package manager like gem from Ruby? I know that an argument could be made that Guix can already be used in this way, but there are many Scheme coders who don't need a system-wide package manager and would rather use a program that can manage Guile packages under a user root like ~/.guile and allow them to easily distribute their packages (something like Python's virtualenvs would also be useful). Perhaps some of the Guix code can be moved to a library, so that both the Guix and the Guile package manager binaries can reuse the same code. Moving Guix' core to a library would also facilitate its inclusion in things like PackageKit, as well as make it easier to create front-ends. I'm not a package management expert so I'm not sure this idea is feasible but I would really like Guile to become more popular, and this I think would be a step in the right direction.
