Re: On the naming of System and Home services modules.

[Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>]

Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 15 2021, Andrew Tropin wrote:

>> Records even for the same services have slightly different fields and
>> because of macro nature can't be reused between Home and System
>> services. In more details I mentioned this problem here:
>> https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel/%3C87y2cqifpx.fsf%40yoctocell.xyz%3E#%3C878s4l8kai.fsf@trop.in%3E
>
> Some services might be useful to have in both Guix System and Guix Home;
> for instance, Guix System currently has a service for configuring
> Syncthing, and I think it makes sense to also have one for Guix Home,
> this would mean that people not using Guix System (me :-)) could also
> have Guix manage Syncthing.  With the current approach, we would have to
> copy and paste quite a bit of code, and if the Syncthing service for
> Guix System changes, then the one for Guix Home might have to change as
> well.

I agree with this point. I have several Guix systems, and several
non-guix systems with Guix managing some services. In the past, I have
had to write my own Shepherd services for things already written as
system services.

>> The intersection of home and system services should be very low, so
>> there is not much benifit here as well.
>
> Quite the opposite, I think it would be great if home and system
> services could integrate more with each other.  In NixOS, the NixOS
> modules and Home Manager modules feel like two very distinct things, and
> it’s not really easy to share things between them.

I agree.

>> ** Summary
>> Let's keep System and Home services separate for the sake of clarity,
>> reuse code via shared modules or just exports in (gnu services ...).

[...]

>> However, ~(gnu home services ...)~ also looks cool, but it would be a
>> little inconsistent with system services, which will have one level of
>> nestiness less: ~(gnu services)~.
>>
>> IMO, ~(gnu home services ...)~ would be a good choice if we use ~(gnu
>> system services)~ for system services.
>
> Yeah, having both (gnu system service) and (gnu home service) could make
> sense, but since we only have (gnu services), I don’t think it makes
> much sense.

I haven't put in the energy to follow the rational behind the proposed
naming schemas, but I'd like to suggest this as well: =(gnu services
home)=. This namespace increases in specificity, and I think it would
easily follow that things in =(gnu services home)= might utilize things
in =(gnu services)=. Or I also like the idea of =home= and =system=
being sibling namespaces.

-- 
Katherine