On Fri, Sep 09, 2016 at 10:45:43AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > Yes, that’s a serious concern. Maybe all we can reasonably hope to > achieve is to provide a core subset of the free NPM packages in Guix > proper, built from source. > > People may still end up using automatically-generated, unchecked > packages for the rest. Nevertheless, that would be an improvement over > the status quo. > > (PyPI, Hackage, CPAN, and CRAN seem to be less problematic in this > regard, maybe because they are “culturally closer” to the free software > movement.)
Not quite true, though there are generally less dependencies to deal with. I still install packages using those language systems - especially with Ruby, R, D and Elixir. It does not matter. Once I want robustness I make sure to package in Guix. npm is just the worst of the lot because of the sheer size, stupidity and circular dependencies. We should really think a bit harder about the transitional phase. Also, software development goes faster in general than that we can package. My take is that GNU Guix proper should be lean, mean and robust. That way we can maintain and rely on stuff. For the more experimental packages and other 'solutions' we ought to depend on channels - or distributed package sources. These need not take the purist view. Pj.
