Re: GNU Manuals in Info/HTML format via Guix?

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Richard,

On Tue, 07 Jan 2025 at 23:16, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> The task here is to distribute Info manuals in a few
> platform-independent non-source forms, perhaps Info and HTML.  Perhaps
> PDF files too.  That is so much simpler than what Guix has to do that
> using Guix for this would be a quick and dirty hack.
>
> The task here can be done with something much simpler, and if we
> decide to do it, writing a clean solution won't take very long.
> And it will be simpler to understand than Guix.

I am not sure to understand: This list is guix-devel hence we speak
about using Guix for many tasks. :-)

Even more, I am convinced that GNU Guix is a perfect basis for
distributing GNU packages to heterogeneous platforms which do not use
Guix themselves.  For instance, see command ’guix pack’ [1].

BTW, you wrote: « Guix is a GNU/Linux distribution, designed for
building packages. » and IMHO it’s a partial view of what Guix is.

Guix is a tool for composing and sharing computational environments; and
building packages is one brick.  Well, for me, the best explanation of
what Guix means is to say “The Emacs of Distros” [2].  As written in
Guile manual (9.1.1 The Emacs Thesis):

       Emacs, when it was first created in its GNU form in 1984, was a new
    take on the problem of “how to make a program”.  The Emacs thesis is
    that it is delightful to create composite programs based on an
    orthogonal kernel written in a low-level language together with a
    powerful, high-level extension language.

And Guix follows this Emacs thesis at the scale of a computational
environment, IHMO.  Where the “kernel” reads ’guix-daemon’ processing
derivations [3] and “high-level language” reads Guile/Scheme.


1: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Invoking-guix-pack
2: https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/the_emacs_of_distros/
3: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Derivations

Cheers,
simon