Man, I’ve really wanted to take the plunge and dedicate some play time to GUIX for a while now. I feel like between the GUIX package system and Shepherd, they’re creating an authentically new and exciting thing in the universe of Linux distributions.<p>The fact that they’re using Scheme for so much of it is also pretty cool, as I think this sort of high level systems programming is a great potential use case for showcasing meta programming as well as the unique power of lisps for code-as-data.
For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin).<p>Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
Interesting,after all this criticism of systemd.<p>This makes me wonder about the GuixSD distribution. Is this distro ready for prime-time. Suppose I switched from Linux Mint to GuixSD, what would be the advantages and disadvantages?<p>I like Lisp and program in Racket, so Guile wouldn't be far from that. I just wonder about experiences of other. How much does switching to such a lesser known free distro as the main OS "constrain" you?
This is awesome! I have really been impressed with gnu's use of guile, and I really like how much more quickly iteration is than many other gnu projects. For those heavy cron users, mcron (guile based cron replacement) has been my favorite so far.<p>With a good deamon manager, we're one step closer to HURD!
Does anyone know if they solved their "trust init script too much" problems?<p>Last time I checked, they were loading user-defined scripts right into PID 1, so a badly written script could bring down the whole system.<p>People blame systemd for pid 1 instability, but at least systemd crashes get fixed eventually. With Shepherd, any package on the system can cause PID 1 to crash, and this just seems to crazy for me.
Pardon me, I'm sort of a casual Linux user and I have no idea what people are talking about. What are GNU Guix and Shepherd? A cursory glance at Wikipedia makes it seem like they're GNU alternatives to the apt-get and init/systemD I've been on for awhile.<p>I'm outside of my Debian comfort zone, apologies for my ignorance! What's significant about this?
There's a quote from the GNU Shepherd manual I really appreciated:<p>> I decided to not make it too sophisticated by trying to guess what the user might want just to theoretically fulfill the request we are processing. If something goes wrong, it is usually better to tell the user about the problem and let her fix it, taking care to make finding solutions or workarounds for problems (like a misconfigured service) easy. This way, the user is in control of what happens and we can keep the implementation simple. To make a long story short, we <i>don't try to be too clever</i>, which is usually a good idea in developing software.