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Personally, I think the chase for silver bullets does more harm than good. I'd rather work with multiple configuration management tools that do one thing well, than to deal with new contenders that seem to want to do it all and spend little effort in being interoperable with other needs outside their use case.

As a single example: Guix does not support setting capabilities on binaries in the store; if you want to set CAP_NET_ADMIN on ping, or you want some service to run with CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, you're stuck. There is no way to make it happen inside Guix, so you're left with very ugly manual hacks (mount --bind /gnu/store /mnt ; setcap...; umount /mnt). Similarly, neither Nix nor Guix can be used as a deployment tool only, since they do not preserve post-deployment configuration changes (to the point that GuixSD even deletes user accounts if they're not in the system configuration).



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