Blake Shaw schreef op wo 15-06-2022 om 17:01 [+0000]: > Thats very good advice and will be a useful guide in refactoring the > parts of the system services documentation. I think in general, we > need to find a nice middle ground between the extremely general and > the immediately sensible, as I remember when I first got into guix > 1.5 years ago, arriving at services left me very confused. I don't doubt your confusal, though personally I'm confused on the confusal and I think I would have been confused by ‘file AND file-like object’. Even more so since we both come from a mathematical background, where AFAICT this kind of terminology and Guix' interpretation is standard. > mathematics I'm a fellow appreciator of the power of generality (the > extreme genericity of scheme and guix is why I'm here!), I also think > if it doesn't obey strict linguistic rules it can antithetical to its > original purpose. I don't see what linguistic rule the term ‘file-like object’ does not follow. > For example, I remember being very confused about > "file-like objects", for the simple reason that it wasn't "a file or > file-like object". While this might come from a GNU terminological > lineage i'm unaware of, AFAIK no relation to GNU. > my immediate reaction to trying to understand > file-likeness is the simple rule that a semblance is strictly not > what it resembles, and likeness qualifies semblance. It would be > improper to place phones in a category of "phone-like objects", > because the likeness assumes a distinction from the thing itself. An object being ‘X-like’ merely means that it is like an X.  This does not imply it _isn't_ an X, only suggests that in some cases it might be a non-X. More concretely, to me phones resemble phones and are objects, so phones are phone-like objects. Summarised, to me semblance/similar/likeness is reflexive, I don't see where the non-reflexivity would come from? Something I dislike about the ‘file AND file-like objects’ construction is that it suggests that files and file-like objects are separate and are handled separately, whereas files (as in, 'local-file' or 'computed-file') are just another case of file-like objects to Guix (next to 'file-append', 'package', 'git-checkout', ...). Furthermore, usually file-like objects aren't files but more often they are packages. For a comparison, suppose we have a hierarchy of concepts, e.g. {0}⊊ℕ⊊ℤ⊊ℚ⊊ℝ⊊ℂ Whole numbers can (informally speaking) be considered to be natural- like numbers. Yet, that doesn't make natural numbers non-whole. Compare: File-like objects are objects that are like a file. Yet, that doesn't make files non-file-like. Greetings, Maxime.