Re: Enterprise Guix Hosting?

[Phil]

Benjamin Slade writes:

> Not something I've tried personally, but maybe PantherX (Guix-based) could be 
> relevant here? https://www.pantherx.org/

This is very interesting - there is definately a niche to produce
off-the-shelf guix-based enterprise solutions that a mainstream devops
team could rollout and interface with "standard" tech tooling without
having to learn (a lot of) Scheme.

My own experience is that whilst it doesn't require a PhD to setup Guix
for the enterprise, it is a non-trivial journey, and it does require
a fair amount of time and effort to create something that regular
developers/scientists (i.e. non-Guix converts who just want to get on with their
day-jobs) accept is as good or better than regular tooling they are used
to.  There's certainly a barrier to entry for people who don't want to
do a deep-dive and just want tooling to support them in their professional
role, without them having to think about it too much.

Upselling the real benefits of Guix like rollbacks, profiles, perfectly
reproducable builds, swapping one dependency for another - even in a
scientific/tech-savvy company with lots of PhDs took a bit of persuading
from me. Even now I think our company is only using perhaps 30% of the
true power of Guix.  Making all that power accessible to people who just
want to get on with their jobs in an easy, intuitive way is a challenge
I'm continuously trying to address.  I also hope things like PantherX
might help bridge the gap in the near future!