Does guile have a package manager?

Question

I'd like to discover the guile ecosystem. I looked at how to install a library and I didn't find a package manager, like python's pip. Does such a thing exist for guile ?

Answer 1

Looks like guildhall is the closest thing to pip out there. There has been some discussion on the Guile mailing lists recently around it. The posts by Wingo, Boubekki, Zaretskii, and a few others who are heavily involved with Guile development indicate a push towards making guildhall an upstream source for something called Guix that is a more general package manager intended to be independent of platform.

If you consult the Guix list of packages you will see guile there and a number of other guile related items (e.g. guile-json, guile-ncurses, etc..). I'd give that a shot. Otherwise you're on your own and you'll have to either fall back to the OS package manager or pull down the source yourself, build, and install.

Full disclosure: I haven't tried Guix myself but I've been meaning to. I'd be very interested to see how it turns out for you so if you do go this route it'd be awesome if you could provide an update with your Guix experience.

There's also been a recent call to update the libraries page and from a quick inspection there's been some small number of updates that you may find useful.

Answer 2

@unclejamil This is an update of my attempt to install the guix package manager.

Documentation

First of all, the links:

• the official page: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
• the download page: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/ (guix-the-system and guix the package manager are listed together)

Installation (Debian)

Guix needs Guile-2.0-dev and more dependencies, which are present in Debian's repositories:

apt-get install guile-2.0-dev guile-2.0 libgcrypt20-dev libbz2-dev libsqlite3-dev autopoint

Download guix. See the above links to download a binary. Or get the sources:

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/guix.git

The installation goes with a classical ./configure && make && make install.

make will take several minutes and make install needs root access. If you install from source, make will build guile objects of the 346 base packages (python, zsh, abiword,…) so it'll take a long time (the database is included into guix-the-program, so we must do that. You can still tweak this list in the Makefile, at MODULES) .

Note: Your current directory must not contain non ascii characters.

Note: see also this complete tutorial, with the focus on how to install guix locally, i.e. not to run make install: http://dustycloud.org/blog/guix-package-manager-without-make-install/

Usage

To install packages with guix, we need a running server.

The first method, for testing purposes, is simply to run the server in a terminal:

sudo guix-daemon 

and the client in another one:

guix package -s "guile.*curses"    # search with regexps
sudo guix package -i guile-ncurses # install. All start with the "package" command.

For the proper method, see https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Build-Environment-Setup.html#Build-Environment-Setup

To be continued.

This answer is a community wiki, feel free to complete it, thanks !

Answer 3

I am building Guix right now and encountered the same error about not finding guile-2.0. I managed to fix it by installing the development files for guile-2.0

sudo apt-get install guile-2.0-dev

I encountered some more errors later on and it just meant I needed to install the development files for it.