GNU Guix 1.2 Adds Btrfs Subvolume Booting, New GNU Hurd Options

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU Guix 1.2 Adds Btrfs Subvolume Booting, New GNU Hurd Options

GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Guix-1.2-Released

[baryluk]

I just tested it, and well for a modern package manager it lacks in some departments.

Parallelism is low. Downloading package is not parallelized in any way (would be good to do 2 downloads at the same time, so it is pipelined fully, instead of download, think, download, think, ...), and rather slow. Same with updating indexes, doing substitutes, unpacking files, etc. It connects to ci.guix.gnu.org unbelievably often. From what I can do it is constantly doing the same thing over and over again, without apparent reason.

Far from optimal.

Upgrade process is extremely verbose and spammy, and not very human friendly.

The output is also very confused (especially progress bars), if you resize the terminal or change the font size in the terminal during upgrade process.

[baryluk]

Does anybody knows if guix supports "multi-arch". I.e. I would love to install some binaries for both x86_64 and aarch64 at the same time. Then with qemu-binfmt-static, and some PATH tweaks, run one or another. I am kind of able to do that on Debian with apt, and it works (tested few days ago).

[Wingfeather]

Does anybody knows if guix supports "multi-arch". I.e. I would love to install some binaries for both x86_64 and aarch64 at the same time.

I don't use guix, but do use NixOS (and know that guix is based on NixOS' paradigm), and essentially, yes - in NixOS, the platform a package is built for is factored into its hash, so the same package built for multiple platforms can coexist in the store with no issues.

Configuring the system to actually do this for you might not be trivial, however.

[Danielsan]

Nice... If only it wasn't so counter intuitive...