GNU Guix

[matrss]

Guix is a package manager, package repository, and through guix system a GNU/Linux distribution that is a different implementation of the same functional packaging approach that nix (#5) first introduced.

To get an isolated environment with some packages available you can use guix shell: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-shell.html

To get a reproducible isolated environment you just have to combine guix shell with guix time-machine (and probably checking in a channel description file into you project): https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-time_002dmachine.html

These two blog posts go into more detail on how this could work:

• https://www.futurile.net/2023/04/30/guix-reproducible-dev-environments/
• https://www.futurile.net/2023/10/17/guix-time-travel-dev-environments/

There is even an active effort to make Guix on HPC a great experience: https://hpc.guix.info/

(Disclaimer: I haven't used guix myself yet; for now I have stayed with nix and just watched guix from afar. But I consider the functional packaging approach implemented by both to be the future of package management, no matter which implementation will become more popular. It is just so intuitive to do it this way.)

[yarikoptic]

@kyleam was our local guixpert.