Re: You say nix, I say guix: Nix 2.0 and Guix

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Chris Marusich <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> On February 22nd, Nix 2.0 was released:
>>
>> https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-relnotes-2.0
>
> Very nice work.  It looks like the CLI is closer to that of Guix now.  :-)
>
>> It contains a lot of interesting new features.  Are there any plans to
>> merge some of the nix-daemon changes into our guix-daemon?
>
> Why not?  What did you have in mind?  One thing we discussed long ago
> was the idea of keeping signatures in the store database, and I think
> Nix 2.0 does that.  That’s something we could borrow.

[...]

>> Conversely, is there anything we can upstream to Nix that they might
>> find useful?
>
> Changes in the daemon are pretty much the only thing we could upstream,
> and I used to do exactly that.  At some point I decided to stop
> following closely upstream and allow ourselves to change the daemon as
> we see fit.  As a result, you may find that not every change that we
> make to our nix/ directory is directly applicable to current Nix.

One possible complication with exchanging code with nix-daemon is that a
few years ago, nix-daemon apparently switched to a multithreaded model,
whereas guix-daemon deliberately avoids threads in the daemon.  See:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-12/msg00363.html

That said, I haven't followed Nix development, so I don't know what has
happened with nix-daemon since then, nor how much this would affect code
sharing in practice.

      Mark