Comment by rekado
1 year ago
Not hostile. We just can't do it. There is no free toolchain for Mac. So we'd have to arbitrarily cut the trust graph and graft it on top of a huge blob of a proprietary toolchain and set of system libraries. That's like building a completely new distribution. Since I'm not using macos and have no interest in committing my own money to keep paying for freedom restricting software to provide a service that would earn the label "supported" there's no way I'm going to make that effort.
That's really more of a "won't", than a "can't".
Sure, it would be impure, and not top-to-bottom reproducible, and you don't personally have to do it. But it's a choice to avoid a compromise, not an impossibility precluded by the laws of math or anything.
Regardless, I no longer really sympathize with Free software's concept of a "freedom" that results in either (1) obscure purity, or (2) benefits large corporations at the expense of the rest of us.
RMS was economically naive, despite his counter-cultural leanings; I can't help but wonder what Free software would have looked like if he'd imagined the likes of MS/Amazon getting rich off it while creators get a pittance. We can't all have free-floating MIT jobs.
Well, there's nobody blocking the work. If not I then surely somebody would personally have to do it. And it's akin to building a completely separate distribution on top of a different foundation, so we could only superficially reuse existing infrastructure.
I'm writing my comments in the first person, because I have actually made the effort to investigate this in the past, more than once.
This is precious little to do with some kind of abstract purity. Hell, I've packaged Tensorflow and CUDA crap, which is as far removed from purity as it gets.
It gets a little tiring to read about values that are projected onto Guix, that I can't find in my own work.
> that I can't find in my own work
But you're not the spokesperson for Guix, are you?
A quick search of GUIX mailing lists turned up this thread from 2017.
From [Chris Marusich](https://narkive.com/BnGNBXUh.7):
> I don't want to use Guix on macOS to package, promote, or make it easy to use non-free software.
Interestingly, that entire thread is a good faith exploration of what it would take to run Guix on mac at the time, but they conclude that there's no Free Software way to bootstrap the entire process, and rule it out. They consider toolchains, compilers, emulators, VMs, Docker, etc. but not starting with XCode.
Which is fine! Guix simply has different values and makes different choices.
You repeatedly say "can't", but given how Guix shares DNA with nix, which has done it on a mac, I'm a bit dubious about any technical infeasibility.
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