News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by nothrabannosir on Friday August 09, 2024 @07:31PM (#41206263)
Funny, I did quite a deep dive on this same issue about two years back, and came to exactly the opposite conclusion: keep ASDF, and lean on Nix to do pinning. I now maintain my own Common Lisp package repository, testing daily against nightly SBCL etc, and I've learned that a lot of CL stability is just because test suites are never run. Nix goes a long way to shield me from the haphazard breakages that other commenters mentioned, but of course it comes with a huge downside: you need to use Nix :)

(just kidding)

Code at https://github.com/hraban/cl-nix-lite if someone is interested.

Obviously since this was written by Fukamachi you know it will be good. Much respect to the man.

Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by zelcon on Friday August 09, 2024 @10:42PM (#41206926)
Really unfortunate that Guix never took off. Guile is so much nicer than Nix slop.
Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by kentrado on Friday August 09, 2024 @11:48PM (#41207153)
The biggest issue for me is how slow guix is when doing guix pull.

Also, the amount of space taken is unacceptable. Several times I had my HD filled with guix garbage.

Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by nothrabannosir on Saturday August 10, 2024 @12:27AM (#41207314)
At the risk of derailing the conversation (although Guix is a lisp so maybe not): I agree 100% but also maybe Nix's pragmatism is why it's more popular? "Pragmatism" being a programming language euphemism for "untyped hacky mess".
Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by ducktective on Saturday August 10, 2024 @01:08AM (#41207454)
>Guix never took off

Why is this in past tense? Guix development is active. It's just Nix is more popular and it's understandable since it's the original idea and it's older.

Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by pxc on Saturday August 10, 2024 @04:00AM (#41208035)
Guix even has a very active, high-quality blog where maintainers detail major technical accomplishments, long-term goals, etc.: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/

From here it seems like they're growing and advancing well. I wish I could find ready historical data on the numbers of packages and services from, say, 4 years ago vs. today, though. I could have sworn Repology used to show year over year stuff but I can't find it now.

Re:qlot: Common Lisp Library Manager by lukego on Saturday August 10, 2024 @05:35AM (#41208366)
The nixpkgs upstream CL infrastructure is also recently updated and IMHO excellent: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#lisp