Making service values transparent

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> Two patches attached.
>>
>> Unfortunately to use this you need to expand out %base-services to add
>> upower to the udev-service form.  Also you need the upower-service,
>> obviously, and upower needs to be added to the dbus-service form as
>> well.
>
> This isn't the first time I've seen people expanding out %base-services,
> and I was also planning to do so for my OS config.  I wonder if we
> should create a 'make-base-services' procedure that accomodates the
> common tweaks to the %base-services list: the MOTD, the list of packages
> for dbus-service, etc.

This must be fixed, basically by making the return value of the
foo-service procedures transparent and amenable to customization,
filtering, etc.

Now that we have extensible gexps, I think we may be able to
“demonadify” those service procedures, by adding declarative forms
corresponding to ‘text-file*’ and co. (just like ‘local-file’ is the
declarative equivalent of the ‘interned-file’ procedure.)

I’m not yet sure this is the right thing, but it’s appealing.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.