Guix for Development
The idea that you can easily type a command and be quickly dumped into a development environment for some software your system runs is amazing. I think it’s something that actually brings people closer towards some of the ideals of GNU or Open Source and better lets you take advantage of everything being open source. (Aside: I think this is also great about Emacs; you can easily jump to the source of most things and there’s usually a way to hack or modify or inspect or debug them immediately).<p>One thing I couldn’t work out how to do in guix was to go the whole way through. Something like:<p>1. Install &#x2F; use some program<p>2. Find some bug or potential improvement<p>3. Run the command to be dumped into a dev environment for that<p>4. Fix or investigate the bug; or implement the improvement<p>5. (The step I don’t know how to do) Use your fixed&#x2F;improved version in your operating system<p>6. (Also don’t know how to leverage guix for this) Share your improvements with others<p>It feels like 5 is somewhat at odds with how guix is meant to work as step 4 is so mutation-heavy, but it also feels like something that an OS which wants to be as gnu as possible should really want to support. And gui should be able to make it safer too by giving you rollbacks. Maybe there’s an easy way to do it and I just don’t know it?