[Bio-packaging] Making the case for GNU Guix ... advice sought

[Pjotr Prins]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 11:29:49PM +0000, Cook, Malcolm wrote:

> Yes.  Agreed.  However, my emphasis here was intended to be that
> Guix can be used to obviate the need for rbenv, virtualenv, and
> friends.    I thought that `guix environment` was going to be an
> effective replacement for them.  Am I mistaken in this?   

I have dropped rbenv, virtualenv and even bundler from my working
environments, thanks to Guix! I am really, really, really happy 
about that.

I even have different profiles for different ruby versions (one is on
1.8.7).

> I hope
> not!  Assuming not, and if I understand your point, then I should
> write instead that this by virtue of guix's ability to set-up and
> tear down environments/profiles that not only specify versions of
> applications, but also libraries/plug-ins/modules for a variety of
> languages (ruby, perl, etc) and tools (emacs, etc).  You mention the
> importance of 'importers' below... perhaps it is the combination of
> available importers (for scaffolding the packaging from external
> repos) along with the ability to use `guix environment` to make them
> available in specified contexts.

Yes, you need to create packages for all gems and Python modules in
use. Importers help define packages quickly.

Pj.