Guix has the nonguix channel, which provides the vanilla Linux kernel and other packages that contain blobs or nonfree parts: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/
The technical details of the quote are correct, but FWIW I'm no longer working on the GHC bootstrap. It's fun for a while but the lack of interest in the Haskell community and the general high level of ridicule and hostility from the rest of the software world towards all things GNU / free software / bootstrapping have kinda turned me off the whole computer thing.
I've built up to GHC 6 (I've stopped after reaching 6) from GHC 4. GHC 4 does use some generated C files, so it's not a pure bootstrap, but it's still much better than taking a binary of GHC 6 or later.
(I'm the author of the 2017 blog post. I had planned a follow-up but since I didn't have much to show I scrapped it.)
Funny you should mention that. I've been trying to use it for a while, but the link on the Guix website to get a Hurd-based VM image is broken and I haven't been able to generate it myself.
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.
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.
> 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.
> But you're not the spokesperson for Guix, are you?
I used to be co-maintainer and I'm working close to full time on Guix. I also happen to have worked on Guix on Mac before; in fact I'm involved in the very mailing list thread you dug up.
We are familiar with the way Nix does it on Mac, but I won't repeat my assessment here. Doing it with XCode and adding an arbitrary cut to the graph would get us to something that resembles Guix only in uninteresting ways.
I self host prosody (an XMPP server) with a TURN server in my living room. With Guix System this is largely declarative, aside from the DNS records and initial user account registration (which I do on the command line).
We're using it for messaging, sharing files, video calls across continents, etc. Re video calls: the XMPP and TURN servers are only used for negotiating the connection, so you don't need a very powerful machine for any of this.
