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 ?
3 Answers
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.

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Good point about trying guix. I had read about it and had seen the list of packages, but I thought it would be a full replacement of `apt` and I didn't think about looking the available guile libraries. I'll try that and keep you informed ! – Ehvince Dec 08 '14 at 10:44
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My experiment quickly aborted. Getting `guile` is easy (`guile-2.0` on debian), getting `guix` isn't possible ATM: 404 to the ftp http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/ from the dowload page at savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8147 – Ehvince Jan 09 '15 at 15:15
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@Ehvince: Hrmmmm... Sorry to hear that. I'll give guix a shot on my system (OpenBSD) and report back. – unclejamil Jan 10 '15 at 13:58
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Guix is alpha software and is available here: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/ An astute reader would have seen it on the documentation at https://gnu.org/software/guix/#download … – Ehvince Jan 17 '15 at 00:05
@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 !

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Unfortunately Guix is unsupported OpenBSD. However, one can check out the Guix repo, run ./bootstrap to create configure, and run $ ./configure --with-courage if you're feeling frisky. :) – unclejamil Apr 17 '17 at 22:33
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.

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That helped me going further, and thanks to him I understood I similarly need `libgcrypt20-dev`. – Ehvince Jan 29 '15 at 13:10
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