Hi Guixers, I wanted to ask you what are your thoughts on this idea. This is a thought experiment at this stage.
Should GNU Guix be a small core of packages (and services?)? For example, GNU Guix would be a core channel containing the reduced binary seed bootstrap and a few other core packages to bootstrap the system. That's it. Users subscribe to this channel to get started. Users could then decide what channels they'd like to subscribe to/opt in to by adding any of the following channels as they please: python-channel rust-channel lisp-channel node-channel ocaml-channel clojure-channel chicken-channel go-channel haskell-channel erlang-channel elixir channel (maybe elixir and erlang are together in one channel) elm-channel gaming-channel texlive-channel ruby-channel linux-channel (kernel) java-channel emacs-channel vim-channel perl-channel php-channel julia-channel r-channel dlang-channel purescript-channel mozilla-channel chromium-channel browsers-channel coq-channel agda-channel idris-channel kde-channel gnome-channel xfce-channel enlightenment-channel pantheon-channel scheme-channel etc... The above channels would still be maintained under the auspices of GNU. What do you think would be the pros and cons of the stratified approach versus the monorepo approach that we currently have? This is mostly a thought experiment as implementing something like this, I imagine, would be quite ambitious and radically different from the approach we are currently following. I'm curious to know what the community thinks about the stratified approach. I'm also curious to learn more about the history of why we chose the monorepo approach. Are there any references that I can read for the latter? Here are some pros I can foresee with the stratified approach. Pros ========= GNU Guix proper would be a solid core of packages that is very easy to maintain. This would greatly reduce the maintenance burden since maintaining a world of rust, golang, or python packages is opt in by those who want to do that particular work. Users can opt out of certain channels. For example, there might be some users that want absolutely no rust or some other language or ecosystem of packages from being downloaded on their machine for whatever reason. Same goes for any other languages. Would being subscribed to just the hypothetical small core channel in this proposal increase download/installation speeds given the availability of substitutes? WDYT
