[p9idf]

That particular Xkcd comic has been posted 79 times in the past year or so† and has quickly become a cliché. The authors' stated goals are to make a "purely functional" and "practical 100% free" package manager.†† They don't mention competition, proliferation, or winning market share. A vague hope of consistency and cohesion accompanying the announcement of a program "approaching its first alpha release" isn't a rallying cry. I think they made this announcement simply so that people interested in this sort of thing might take a look.

† http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F%...

†† http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/ROADMAP

[morsch]

Hah. Your post made me curious which xkcds are the most popular on HN. This is the top10 (caveat below):

     48 http://xkcd.com/927/
     48 http://xkcd.com/386/
     33 http://xkcd.com/538/
     28 http://xkcd.com/378/
     24 http://xkcd.com/810/
     23 http://xkcd.com/327/
     22 http://xkcd.com/323/
     21 http://xkcd.com/605/
     19 http://xkcd.com/936/
     17 http://xkcd.com/552/

You can easily reproduce the results by using the hnsearch API via

  curl  "http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com&limit=100&start=<iterate> 

and

  grep -ohE "http://xkcd.com/[0-9]*/" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Unfortunately, I could only process the first 1000 entire list of ~1500 results because the API refused queries with start > 900. I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

[kyle_wm]

> I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/688/

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

[simonh]

It's a fair cop.