this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)
Guix
446 readers
1 users here now
Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system developed by the GNU Project
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, it's a common gripe.
I wish GUIX would just symlink libraries to standard paths instead of having to educate every single downstream tool where everything is with Env Variables
Is it such a big ask to expect bash to exist at /bin/bash?
@tetris11 @jaennaet This wouldn't work. You couldn't have users running their own choice of gcc version, for example, as they'd clobber each other. The way things work actually makes a lot of problems fade, such as DLL hell.
But you typically run different commands in different shells, so if you needed to run different gcc's, you could just create a customized chroot for each shell and make sure that all the tools are where they should be (/usr/bin/ /lib etc)
@tetris11 Typically but not always. Oftentimes guix runs on top of a foreign distribution, and then a chroot jail might be unhelpful.
how so? a chroot jail is a chroot jail. As long as you've got all your toys where they should be, what difference does it make to the distro?
@tetris11 Because guix as a general rule knows nothing about the underlying operating system, so you can't expect it to set things up as you describe.
oh, true. In my head chroot is just proc/sys/dev binding, but you're right that there are OS specific paths there too
That does sound like a reasonable ask.
What are the upsides of Guix – in your view, anyhow – that make people be OK with downsides like this? I mean, this does seem like a fairly major downside, so there's go to be fairly major upsides too, or at least I'd assume so
I just think the declarative syntax is cool, and is easier to read than Nix
@jaennaet @tetris11 Once you've got everything set up, you can run your binaries in special containers for system isolation, make Docker images for distribution, run your stuff on other machines which have #guix on them, and generally enjoy the fruits of your labours.