Re: Communication and Design at Guix

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello,

L  p R n  d n    <guix@lprndn.info> skribis:

> After taking some time learning Guix and trying to get some new packages
> in, I wanted get involved in a slightly different way. I'm not good at
> programming and I think my time might be better used participating in
> tasks a little more inline with my skills.
> The thing is that I find "design" and "communication" (take it in a very broad
> way) often a little more complex and delicate to tackle in a group
> project. This is why I'm introducing the idea with this mail.

This is one of the non-programming activities where Guix needs help so
I’m glad you’re offering to contribute!

> I think the Guix project could benefit a lot from dealing with the
> "rest of the world" and how it wants to show itself. It might even help
> clarify some technical decisions if needed. Bonus is that next release
> will probably be 1.0 and that it means Guix will get extra attention.
>
> I have a few things I would like to talk about but, as I don't want to
> force aniything on anyone, I wanted to first have your thoughts about this and
> eventually what you guix people think would be nice to tackle on. (I
> think I saw something about a wiki somewhere for example etc.)

I’m not sure we need a wiki.  :-)

A very concrete task that could be of interest to you is the “name
change” (a bit of a strong word) that we’d like to implement by 1.0.
I’ll try to summarize.  Currently we have “Guix” and “GuixSD”, and that
confuses things: people visit the web site, they see a “GuixSD” logo and
get confused because they were just looking for a package manager, not a
whole distro, or they think “GuixSD” is a storage device ;-), things
like that.

The idea is to bring everything under the “Guix” name.  Most of the
time, writing “Guix” is good enough—after all, one can run ‘guix system’
on a foreign distro, too.  When we really need to make the distinction,
for instance in the manual, we would write “Guix System” to designate
what we currently call “GuixSD”.

This has implications mostly on the web site and on the manual.  Ricardo
sketched web site modifications here:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-01/msg00300.html

It would probably have further implications on how we present
Guix/GuixSD.

WDYT?

> By the way, I wanted to start working on the documentation. 
> IMHO, it might benefit from a little graphical enhancement for
> newcomers. The thing is that it's currently hosted on
> gnu.org so it's probably not possible to modify the design. So I wanted
> to ask, first, if that's something that would be welcome? What could be
> the possibilities? And what would be the technical limitations?

The HTML pages at gnu.org/s/guix/manual are generated from Texinfo.  The
CSS there is shared with all the GNU manuals, which is nice for
consistency.  Ideally modifications of the CSS would be submitted to the
GNU webmaster or bug-gnulib@gnu.org (I forgot which one).  However, be
aware that you may encounter misplaced conservatism if you take that
route, so don’t lose your hair on it.

Thanks,
Ludo’.