Re: Guix (and Guile's) promise, and how to (hopefully) get there

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello Christine!

Thanks for your thoughtful message and for the good vibes!  It’s great
to be able to count on the support and advice of an experienced leader.

There are many things in your message, let me reply selectively.  :-)

Dave and you mention that you perceive Guix as “on the decline” or
“stagnant”.  According to Git and <https://openhub.net/p/gnuguix>, the
number of contributors is stagnant indeed, which I think comes from a
number of factors, primarily: not enough review work is done by
committers, as you wrote, and tooling (qa.guix) *and the folks taking
care of it* have a hard time keeping up.  I also think co-maintainers
could have been stirring it up more than that.

Email may be an additional factor but, as you write, not the main one—we
have no shortage of patches coming in!


Regarding GNU, I tend to view it as a somewhat secondary issue, which
doesn’t mean it should be neglected, but it’s perhaps less of a priority
than the other topics.


So, governance.  When I started the project, I thought that it will have
been successful if I can quietly leave it and it keeps going; in that
sense I was so happy when I left the maintainer collective!

I’m not the only one who can do so, but I can certainly use my “social
capital” to support initiatives and help make progress on governance
matters—I spent time recently defining the roles and responsibilities of
teams, and I plan to spend time to help shape the RFC process proposed
last year: <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/66844>.

But I also want to leave enough room to everyone.  As you and Ekaitz
wrote, each one of us can step up and take part in this work; some have
experience with governance (be it for free software projects or for
unrelated non-profits), others have energy and are willing to learn…
And there’s also lots of non-governance work to do.  Let’s all do what
we can to shape this project and keep it moving!

I’m sympathetic with what Ekaitz wrote: we must take care of one another
and not put too much burden on the shoulders of any single person.

Ludo’.