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From: Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>
To: Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Meta Guix: why guix is awesome!
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 07:44:04 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210429054404.tpyl6qj35s3b6ezy@thebird.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7966a531b5bf82f4c6a9b7c6e9a610602ee257ec.camel@student.tugraz.at>

Hi Leo (Prikler),

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 01:52:12AM +0200, Leo Prikler wrote:
> I don't know enough about marketing to give you a good answer on that,
> but when it comes to what we're competing against, it seems to be a
> rather uphill battle outside of the small bubble, that we've carved
> out.  According to distrowatch we're still far away from Nix and back
> when I was using Gentoo I thought that was some super niche distro.

As Guix is now also a Debian package I think it is doing extremely
well. I know people who are silently introducing Guix :). As a full
distro it may be niche, but it is also very successful because it
keeps growing and growing. Nix has a 10 years head start (I was there)
and does better in industry, but it does not mean it wil be ahead in
another 10 years.

Look where Linux came from.

> Guix may perhaps not be the smallest package manager (to be honest, I
> have no way of telling as it's the only one I'm involved in), but I can
> definitely say, that it does things well, so your point about violating
> Unix philosophy is invalidated :P

Guix abides by the Unix philosophy in many ways. All the tools (or
their invocations) do the minimum. It is actually an interesting
mixture of composition and isolation. Guix has the advantage of
learning from other attempts. But think about the Guix choice of
shepherd over systemd: systemd is not a tool in the spirit of Unix (in
my opinion) because it tries to think for you and can be unpredictable
:). Guix' focus is on being predictable and hackable - i.e., very Unix
spirited.

> Also, Guix does not yet write email for you, we still have to offload
> that to git.

Ah, yes. I would like that feature.

> Which ties back to point 2.  Guix aims to be inclusive and being
> inclusive means toning down the rudeness.

That is true. Though rudeness can also serve a purpose (Linus comes to
mind though he is trying to tone down the last years) and some people
can't help it. We walk a fine line here when we tell people to be less
rude and lose some value if we can not be honest. There is a cultural
angle for sure. The Fins, Dutch, Russians and Germans can be honest in
their language, but that appears as rude in English. Common English
can be extremely rude in Japanese. I think, in an intercultural sense,
we ought to strive for not taking everything at face value, and try
reading beyond the surface. Some people are in the autistic spectrum,
do we shut them down and have them not participate? I don't think that
is particularly inclusive either. 

Even so, if someone crosses a line with intent to hurt we should have
policies that protect the attacked. That is civil.  But I'd argue
against judging people by popular opinion. Courts of law are there to
judge badness.  Likewise, projects have policies and a code of
conduct. We should abide by those (the alternative being that people
can decide not to participate with the project). It is very hard,
perhaps impossible, to defend yourself against (perceived) popular
opinion.

Character assassination on the internet is all to common now. What we
should aim for is trying to keep discussion technical in a technical
project, even is it is in reality also a social experiment - as all of
free software is and even humanity as a whole. The good news is that
almost all our discussions and choices can be technical.

> - I don't think anyone has ever been offended by trees – it's usually
> the other way round – but there are (some reasonable and some less
> reasonable) arguments to support one's fear of spiders, both physical
> and digital.

We had a cat that got stuck in a tree once. Since that time he looked
up and we could virtually see him think: trees are evil. He never went
up again.

Trees can be perceived as evil even if they are obviously benefitial.
Being inclusive actually implies celebrating our differences. 

Pj.


  reply	other threads:[~2021-04-29  5:47 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-04-28 17:20 Meta Guix: why guix is awesome! Joshua Branson
2021-04-28 23:52 ` Leo Prikler
2021-04-29  5:44   ` Pjotr Prins [this message]
2021-04-29  9:50     ` Leo Prikler

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