[Bio-packaging] Packaging

[Brad Chapman]

Pjotr and all;
Thanks for organizing this mailing list and kicking off the discussion.

> Linuxbrew is the only one that does not require a daemon (that means
> root rights). But I am not satisfied by its dependency handling and
> versioning of packages.

This is a good two sentence summary of the choices. I like Linuxbrew
because it has a community around homebrew-science and works simply without
needing root privileges. It does not do dependencies well and all of the
other nice things Guix provides. However, practically I need something I
can automate so that users won't need root privileges to install.
Getting people to pre-install Guix on clusters is going to be a hard sell.

> Also (I think) there is no binary support for
> packages.

It does have the bottle system which is well worked out for Mac and
in-progress for Linuxbrew:

https://github.com/Homebrew/linuxbrew/issues/380#issuecomment-103776899

I'm still leaning on Docker as the solution to a lot of the underlying
issues. I've been patiently waiting for user namespace support which
will allow users to run Docker containers without needing
root-equivalent privileges. When that lands I'm hoping to push it more
as a solution. If that takes off then we can do any sort of package
management we want inside the container and will not need to worry about
root installation.

Hope this helps with my current practical needs. I appreciate all the work on
Guix and improving package management,
Brad