@mauve If it can't be packaged in Guix and people have tried, that's a bad smell ;)

@cwebber @mauve Yeah, as a packager that's not a Guix user I would agree.

Similarly for me I have "If gentoo only provides it as a *-bin package, run away, don't look back" (Gentoo being much less strict, like reproducibility isn't a concern)

@lanodan @mauve @cwebber Who just said *signal-desktop* and *anki*?

@cwebber I feel like there's a lot of downsides to end users by having this restriction which would reduce adoption outside of tech people that care about this stuff very strongly.

In my experience the average person want's to do as little as possible to get something running. It's why app stores and websites are so popular IMO.

@mauve "guix pack"

@cwebber Does guix make it easy to distribute to Mac/Windows in addition to different flavors of Linux by any chance?

@mauve @cwebber #Guix requires a #POSIX environment and #GNU tools.

So in #Windows it will work mainly through #WSL. On Mac there's probably some other thing for similar effect.

At least if you want to run Guix directly.

But as @cwebber mentions, you can use guix pack in which case there are a bunch of other formats including plain Docker images you can use for deployment of arbitrary programs and bundles.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html

@mauve @cwebber It's funny to me because since smartphones got popular, I've always explained distro/ports repositories as basically "app stores but community-based and providing additional safety & maintenance guarantees".

@cwebber Yeah totally. I appreciate it when I can just clone a repo and run `make && make install`.

Sometimes it's a huge pain in the ass if they expect you to have a specific OS/distro with a specific set of packages installed. 😭