Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali <me@fabionatali.com>]

On 2023-12-30, 20:28 +0100, Wilko Meyer <w@wmeyer.eu> wrote:
> As the 37c3 has ended today, were the sessions fun so far/did
> everything go well? Curious to hear how things went and if you were
> able to reach new folks interested in Guix at the event.

Hi Wilko,

Thanks for asking. Indeed I was thinking of writing a short post-37c3
recap to tell about the sessions, so this is a good opportunity.


tl;dr.

Congress (or 37c3) was great fun! We had two Guix self-organised
sessions with very good turnout of participants. There's definitely
interest around the project at Congress. My 2 cents is that we should
think of organising ourselves in an "assembly"⁰ next year, possibly
together with other Lisp projects.


Intro.

We ended up having two Guix self-organised sessions, on Day 1 and Day 3,
as per the following two posts on the 37c3 site:

- Day 1, GNU Guix, an introduction¹
- Day 3, GNU Guix, a hands-on session²

Congress self-organised sessions are non-official sessions that anybody
can register on the event's portal, simply providing a description and
saying when and where to meet up.


Day 1, GNU Guix, an introduction.

The introductory session on Day 1 wasn't so bad, I think. Given the low
level of feedback on the Fediverse I was expecting very few people,
instead I think we were north of 30 participants! (Do I live in a
Fediverse bubble? Yes, I probably do.) We had to improvise a bit,
sitting on the floor in circle and talking as loud as we could given the
noisy environment.

We had a round with everybody briefly explaining their experience with
Guix. Then we mostly went through the following list of introductory
topics.

- Intro 👋
- What's Guix?
    - Functional
    - Transactional
    - Declarative
        - A base system definition
        - Build and run a system definition 1/2
        - A slightly more advanced system definition
        - Build and run a system definition 2/2
        - Using Guix on a VPS
- How it works
    - The Store
    - What's in a package?
    - Package dependencies
- How many packages available?
- Guix environments with guix shell
- Guix for reproducibility
- Guix as a package manager on a foreign distribution
- Guix Home
    - Guix Home in a container
    - A more complicated example
    - Info on the current Guix Home
- How to contribute
- Resources

Luckily I had put together a little web page so everyone could follow
along looking at the website as we were going through the list. Nothing
particularly valuable, but here³ is the source code if anybody wants to
look at the contents in more detail. After the session, people seemed
generally happy and willing to try Guix or experiment with it more.


Day 3, GNU Guix, a hands-on session.

The session on Day 3 was more seriously limited by the same logistic
problem. Without a projector/monitor, no chance of any meaningful
hands-on work and all we could do was a round of "if there's a blocker
that's preventing you from using Guix or from using it more, what is it
and can we do anything about it?".

Some of the problems discussed:

- A participant mentioned a problem when trying to create a Guix package
  for some Python library. They said the number of missing dependencies
  was overwhelming and that they got a bit frustrated. We mentioned
  something about `guix import' but I don't think we did a great job at
  addressing the problem.
- Someone said they had been trying to create a stripped-down version of
  Guix but they got a bit frustrated by some internal dependencies
  (e.g. avahi) that apparently can't be easily removed.
- Someone mentioned some user-experience issue when working on Guix
  packages, e.g. with Geiser and the Guix REPL.

Probably we didn't do a great job at providing answers/solutions. On the
other hand, things would have been much easier if we had been in front
of a monitor or in a context where we could split in small groups and do
some pair-programming. Some of the participants might see this thread
and be willing to provide their feedback too?


Final considerations.

There's definitely interest around Guix at Congress. The turnout at both
sessions was more than I expected. I think we should consider forming a
Congress Assembly next year, either as Guix itself, or possibly joining
forces with other Lispy things? I don't think there was any Emacs
assembly, for example. A Lisp assembly would have a huge potential!

Having an assembly would help tremendously, as we'd be assigned our own
fixed space where organise sessions, etc.

Apologies for the long email. I hope it's useful feedback.

Cheers, thanks, Fabio.


- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress
- 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231042816/https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-an-introduction/
- 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231042326/https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-hands-on-session/
- 3: https://git.sr.ht/~fabionatali/guix-intro/tree/main/item/main.org


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com