(begin (use-modules (srfi srfi-19)) `((title . "Emacs as a general-purpose package manager") (author . "Ludovic Courtès") (date unquote (make-date 0 0 0 0 4 9 2014 7200)) (content div (p (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/guix")) "GNU Guix") ", the package manager written for the GNU system, now has a neat Emacs user interface! It offers a visual, user-friendly alternative to the guix package " (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-package.html")) "command-line interface") "." (br)) (p "For those familiar with " (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Packages.html")) "package.el") ", the main user interface is quite similar: commands like guix-newest-available-packages, guix-search-by-regexp, and guix-installed-packages present a browsable list of packages. Individual packages can be selected, which displays additional details and presents a button to install or delete them. It is also possible to mark a set of packages for installation, upgrade, or deletion, and execute the set of operations in a single transaction." (br)) (p "The interface has been developed by Alex Kost and was merged in Guix a day ago. It uses " (a (@ (href "http://nongnu.org/geiser/")) "Geiser") ", the beloved Guile/Emacs interface and development environment, to communicate with the underlying Guile process. That Guile process, in turn, simply uses Guix and " (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-Modules.html")) "the whole distribution") " as libraries—the goodness of embedding the " (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Defining-Packages.html")) "packaging DSL") " in a general-purpose language." (br)) (p "Try it out and " (a (@ (href "http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/#contact")) "let us know") " what you think!" (br)))))