Comment by LanternLight83
3 years ago
I used Gentoo for over a year, from at least early April 2020 until my migration to GNU Guix in early December 2022. Got into DWM, LTO, minimal systems. It taught me more than any other distro, and there's still a lot I miss about Portage and the Gentoo community. Still use `functions.sh` to style my personal Bash scripts. Functional package managers have not nurtured the same culture around diverse USE flag support and quality packages + docs, and I wish I could just glue them together. Some day.
Good news! One of the Google Summer of Code projects for Guix is indeed adding something similar to the USE flags (called Parametrized Packages)[0]
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0: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-05/msg001...
That's really interesting, thanks for sharing!
Prikler's suggested syntax feels apt, as sugar for (I imagine) a set of native Guile parameters around the remaining fields of the package definition. Infrastructure will need created to implement inheritance, possibly at the level of fluids, in a manner that complies with the Guix maintainers preferences.
Thinking about how I tended to manage my USE flags (ie. through `package.use` as a directory), I think that the balance of package-level impact and operating-system-level syntax (how will services be affected?) will be interesting to see developed