Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [libreplanet-discuss] programming language package manager

[Ludovic Courtès]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> skribis:

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> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> Is anyone working on making a free version of some repository?

In Guix we try to address it by importing package definitions from those
repositories (pip, RubyGem, Hackage, CPAN, etc. but also ELPA) into Guix
itself, with tools to do that semi-automatically:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html
  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-refresh.html

This is of course a lot of work, and we cannot claim to have all of the
repos imported and up-to-date.  In part, this is a feature, because we
do additional filtering (keeping only free software) and QA.  Some of
the repos, such as npm (JavaScript), are currently downright out of
reach, though.

The idea/hope is that our solution should be sufficiently attractive to
be preferable to the language-specific package managers: it integrates
everything into one tool and distro, and makes it possible to benefit
from nice features of Guix with those packages (transactional upgrades,
reproducible and controlled environments, etc.)

Ludo’.