Prot Asks: Julien about Emacs, functional package managers, Nix, Guix, and reproducibility

In this video I talk with Julien Malka who is a PhD student on supply chain security. I have known Julien through Emacs, so we start our discussion with some comments on how Julien uses Emacs for note-taking and as a general purpose computing environment. We then shift our attention to the research area of Julien which involves, among others, functional package managers and reproducibility at-large. In this light, we cover Nix at length while commenting on its GNU counterpart, Guix. Nix is a functional package manager, a programming language, and can also be deployed as a fully fledged operating system. I learn from Julien about the different kinds of reproducibility and gain a better understanding of what kind of advantages we get by using a functional package manager for our system. The "recipes" that derive software packages in this world are written in a pure functional programming language and Julien explains what kind of advantages this design has. Julien explains that NixOS is quite different from other Linux distributions, in terms of how it does certain things. As such, those who want to use it should know what they are working towards and have the right expectations. Towards the end of our talk, I also ask Julien about academic life in France with regard to digital sovereignty and the kind of incentives researchers have for contributing to free and open source software.

Links from Julien Malka

my personal website: https://luj.fr
NixOS home page: https://nixos.org
Guix home page: https://guix.gnu.org/
reproducible-builds: https://reproducible-builds.org
bootstrapable-builds: https://www.bootstrappable.org
Eelco Dolstra PhD thesis: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-t...

About "Prot Asks"

In this new video series, I talk to anybody who is interested to have a video call with me (so do contact me if you want!). The topics cover anything related to Emacs, technology, and life in general. More here: https://protesilaos.com/prot-asks/.