[Trisquel-devel] Installing dependencies for latest emacs and gcc releases

[David Lecompte]

> > One suggestion could be to use the Guix package manager available at
> > Trisquel.
> 
> I shall look into the capability very closely.
> 

On every non-headless Trisquel machine I install for myself or someone else,
I install guix. One reason is to have ungoogled-chromium, as it happens that
a few important websites are not functional enough with abrowser.

I follow exactly the procedure in the Trisquel wiki for this (there is a
link to it from the "All manuals" page), on Trisquel with MATE environement.
I have used guix once succesfully with KDE on wayland but I recall that some
extra things were needed as KDE did not use /etc/profile.d/guix.sh installed
by the guix package. I should try this again and add to the wiki the extra
configuration needed.

Two things to note:
- there have been slow response from savannah when running "guix pull",
often getting a 504 error in response. In this case, retrying until it works
can be a solution. However, there is a mirror (which may become or already
have become the main repository, but I did not follow the discussions) on
codeberg which was much faster recently. To use it, add "--
url=https://codeberg.org/guix/guixhttps://codeberg.org/guix/guix" after
"guix pull".
- when running "guix install package_xxx" or "guix upgrade", if there are no
substitutes (pre-built binaries) available for some needed packages, your
computer will try building them. If this is ungoogled-chromium, on my
machines, it typically takes several days, if it ever succeeds at all. If
that happens, I just do Control+C to interrupt it and wait a few days before
retrying. It is possible to only upgrade specific packages by running "guix
upgrade package-xxx package-yyy".

Have a good time with Guix on Trisquel !

However, if you use Parabola, you very quickly have the most up-to-date
version of packages. I regularly travel with a computer with Parabola as
only distro installed, it is fine as a daily driver.

In my opinion, the main drawbacks of Parabola are that:
- Parabola installation is not automatic, you need to do basic configuration
according to the wiki and think of installing all the packages you need
(like the right xorg driver, that I tend to forget), it took me a bit of
time to get it working for the first time, but then it is fine as a daily
driver.  You could try it with a virtual maching in Trisquel. To make your
life a little easier, use the systemd option, at least until you get
familiar enough with Parabola.
- It regularly happens that system upgrade (which one should normally do
before installing any package) is not possible, often because some package
in the "libre" repository (from Parabola) needs to be rebuilt due to some
package upgrade in archlinux repositories (used by Parabola). Any failure of
system upgrade should be reported so that Parabola developers are aware and
fix it. Check the issues marked "sticky" and if any matches with your
problem, add a comment to it, otherwise check "recent issues" and if none
matches with your problem, create a bug report.

-- 
David Lecompte <trisquel at metani.fr>