Guix for development
This wonderful article by Marius Bakke (thanks for using Haunt btw!) about guix shell hit the orange website front page recently. I left a comment to the effect of “hell yeah I use it for all my projects!” and someone asked me for an example of what I do. I sent them some links but I thought hey, this could be a blog post and I haven't written one of those in years!
The tl;dr is that Guix is a fantastic developer productivity tool that can easily automate development environment creation and pre-release build testing and you should give it a try but if you like what you already use then that's fine, too.
This is the “Are you tired of this?” part of the infomercial. Read the next few paragraphs and picture me, in grayscale color, struggling to hold a large stack of boxes, all labeled “software.” I continue struggling to balance the boxes as you read. When you've reached the last paragraph of the section, I fall over, the boxes land on top of me and all over the floor, I'm covered in spaghetti, and in an exasperated voice I shout "There's gotta be a better way!"
When setting up a new computer for software development, I want to go from git clone to make in as little time as possible (adjust that for your VCS and build system of choice.) In the old days, this meant manually installing the dependencies through the distro package manager. If things are organized, the project README will have a list of what is needed and it's not so bad. If things are less organized, it's a cycle of installing packages and running ./configure or whatever until it succeeds. Hopefully none of the dependencies are too new to be found in the distro. And when working on multiple projects, hopefully there's no conflicts between the dependencies required for each of them, because your development environment is the entire system and there's no way to isolate different projects from each other.
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