Re: Creating an Emacs Home Configuration Service

[Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in>]

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On 2022-10-19 10:53, Zain Jabbar wrote:

> Aloha All,
>
> Super awesome to hear from you! I'm quite star stuck.
>
> Thank you for showcasing Andrew Tropin's rde project. I believe the
> =features= abstraction have potential and make more intuitive sense
> for the design of configurable programs. There is a lot for me to
> learn from this design choice.
>
> As it stands, =features= are not in Guix proper, are there plans to
> merge them?

There was no plan to merge this mechanism to Guix proper and I think
it's actually good to maintain this as a separate project/guix channel,
however it is discussable.  Features itself are quite opinionated and
doesn't fit general-purpose nature of the Guix IMO, so I don't think we
(Guix devs) want to merge them.

> How will they end up relating to the existing home services feature
> set?

rde features are basically wrappers around home and system services,
which allows to share values among those services, also it allows to
implement polymorphic behavior.

You can trace origins somewhere in rde-devel mailing list:
https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel/%3C87sg56g97i.fsf%40trop.in%3E

Because rde features are a user-facing interface, and services mechanism
is slightly hidden underneath, rde's home and system services are less
suitable for end-user, but more flexible.  We (rde devs) usually don't
use records, which help to define rigid config structure, provide
autocompletion, field existence and type checks, and other benifits, but
provide sxml or other sexp based representation of underlying
configuration formats.

BTW, there is an emacs-home-service-type in rde:
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/59a2c1ef615aac7c5dac08660bd00ea5873e77b7/rde/home/services/emacs.scm#L20

and you can find various usage examples in people's configuration or in
rde/feature/emacs* modules.
https://git.sr.ht/~krevedkokun/dotfiles/tree/master/item/config/home/yggdrasil/emacs.scm
https://git.sr.ht/~akagi/guixrc/tree/master/item/magi/home/emacs.scm
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/rde/features/emacs.scm
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/rde/features/emacs-xyz.scm

>
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 5:36 AM Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Zain, and welcome!
>>
>> Zain Jabbar <zaijab2000@gmail.com> skribis:
>>
>> > Running =guix home search emacs= returns nothing. I also could not find an
>> > email using =C-u M-x debbugs-gnu= about an Emacs configuration service.
>> >
>> > This is my first email to this mailing address. Please give me pointers on
>> > formatting and further improvements.
>> >
>> > I have attempted to make an =emacs-home-service-type= so that it is
>> > possible to configure Emacs using Guix home. This code is extremely
>> > preliminary hence I don't even think it is worth sending as a patch. Also I
>> > have never worked on a multi person Git project before and do not know how
>> > to solve the keyring error I get when using guix pull. I will outline what
>> > my code does and what features I would like to add.
>>
>> I am all for something like you describe, and the code you sent may be
>> good starting point!
>>
>> The rde project¹ by Andrew Tropin et al. may be a good source of
>> inspiration.  The “features” abstraction in particular seems to be
>> well-suited for Emacs.  But overall it’s reasonable to start small, with
>> a low-level approach to combine and configure Emacs packages.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ludo’.
>>
>> ¹ https://trop.in/rde/manual

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

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