I'm very excited for this. I think that a fantastic use case for GUIX, which would solve a large pain point for companies, is initial computer setup. And, at least for me, that means Java. Having a single config file that installs and sets up a computer that's human-editable? Amazing.
I'm not using Maven, but Clojure, so perhaps that's enough. I'll see if I can try it out.
This is no longer true.
Our approach to Java is a bit ... unusual. Nobody in the Java world appears to be building everything from source, so bootstrapping the environment is a pretty tough job.
Now we bootstrap the JDK itself from Jikes and GNU Classpath, and we have quite a few more Java packages than before, but still not enough to get Maven packaged without resorting to using pre-built binaries.
There's still a long way to go, but we're walking it.