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GuixPkgs Fuses Guix and Nix: Entire Package Set as a Single Flake

fzakaria.com@mild_lion4 hours ago·Systems Engineering·3 comments

Farid Zakaria's GuixPkgs makes every Guix package available as a Nix flake, letting you mix packages from both systems without needing Guix installed.

guixpkgsfarid zakarianixguixnix flakespackage management

357 bytes. That's the seed from which Guix bootstraps everything up to GCC and glibc, and now every one of those builds lands in /nix/store as a Nix package. GuixPkgs, a new flake by Farid Zakaria, takes the entire GNU Guix package set and exposes it as a Nix flake you can pull into any Nix project without a Guix daemon anywhere on the machine.

What GuixPkgs Actually Gives You

A single flake input on github:fzakaria/guixpkgs gives you access to every package Guix knows about. You mix and match: pkgs.git from Nixpkgs, guixPkgs.hello from Guix, all in the same mkShell or derivation. The demo flake in the repo does exactly that. Run nix build github:fzakaria/guixpkgs#hello and /nix/store gets a hello built from Guix's source bootstrap, not Nixpkgs's version.

Some packages only exist in Guix. Guile-PNG, assorted GNU Guile libraries, and anything that hasn't been ported to Nixpkgs are now one nix build away.

How It Works: The Technical Trick

Fixing a Guix commit, then using guix time-machine to dump every .drv file, Zakaria feeds them through guix-transfer -- a tool he built earlier that rewrites Guix derivations into Nix derivations. The result gets indexed by by-name/ and metadata tagged with the Guix channel, commit, and timestamp in guix-metadata.json.

Realizing a Guix package under Nix recompiles Guix's entire bootstrap chain from that 357-byte seed. That's hours per closure. To skip that, GuixPkgs ships a Cachix binary cache (cachix use guixpkgs). Domen Kožar sponsored extra storage for it.

Why This Matters Beyond the Meme

Zakaria explicitly calls out the next horrendous possibility: an overlay that swaps every Nixpkgs package with its Guix equivalent. You could build a NixOS system where every binary comes from Guix's bootstrap. That is deeply weird and deeply interesting for anyone who wants to audit supply chains or experiment with hermetic builds across two package ecosystems.

No more porting packages between systems. No more running two package managers. Just a flake that bridges the gap, and a binary cache to keep build times sane.

Source: GuixPkgs: every Guix package, as a Nix flake
Domain: fzakaria.com

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