Hi, Federico Beffa <be...@ieee.org> skribis:
> Suppose that Guix pack bundles become popular and compare them to, > say, Mac style archives. Let's go through Ludovic's analysis: > > 1. Composability: With Mac bundles you extract the archive in a > directory. With Guix packs it's essentially the same. > > i. Sharing of store items: What are the chances that two > independent projects will generate packs from the same git checkout > (or guix pull)? Pretty low. Therefore the amount of sharing > between different packs will be pretty negligible. That’s not true; you’d be likely to share glibc, gcc:lib, maybe GLib, GTK+, etc. > ii. Adding a program. Mac style: you just extract it. With Guix > pack it's essentially the same, but it creates a manually > unmanageable network of links which entangle all packs. > > iii. Remove an item: Mac style: delete a directory. With Guix pack > the choice is: delete everything or keep everything. That is, you > keep obsolete programs/libraries with security holes on your system > ready for exploitation and unnecessarily filling your disk, or > ... start from scratch. Is this composability? > > 2. Security: Mac style bundles are problematic, but at least you can > easily delete old stuff and replace them with updated versions. > Guix packs are worse: delete everything or keep it all. > > 3. Reproducibility: As long as you carefully take note from which git > checkout you generate a Guix pack, Guix packs seems to be superior. > Oh, don't you also depend on upsteam published archives of every > single package in Guix? They sometimes disappear or are replaced > in place with different archives and so, after some time, your > carefully noted git checkout will not build anymore. > > 4. Experimentation: Guix is great for that, but packs? Are they > useful for testing on other GNU/Linux systems? Maybe. But aren't > all Guix packages built in isolated environments anyway? So, do > you really need packs to test on other systems? Maybe, but > probably not. > > Don't get me wrong, I find that Guix proper has many great features, > but pack is not one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I agree! :-) Again, I think packs are useful in some cases where the other options are even worse, but I’m not advocating it as a general “solution.” In the news entry online I tried to take into account the very legitimate criticisms you made, but perhaps the end result didn’t make it sufficiently clear that packs aren’t a general solution. Ludo’.