this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)
Guix
445 readers
9 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
As someone who doesn't use Guix, reading this made me wonder why a "consumer" (ie. not someone running eg. corporate infrastructure or whatever) would want to use it, if something as seemingly trivial as this requires that much work.
What I mean is that I'm obviously just missing something, since there's got to be upsides to the system that make cases like this worth it.
Anybody feel like educating a dunce?
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