Re: SSH service for Guix Home

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello!

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:

> On 2021-12-15 18:59, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> Also, could you (or Xinglu, or Oleg) write a blog post for guix.gnu.org,
>> targeting an audience who’s not familiar with this kind of tool, making
>> it clear what the rationale is and what it can bring to “normal users”?
>> It would be really helpful to have that published within a couple of
>> weeks or so, before the next release.
>
> I have a blog post task in my backlog, I want to upstream more home
> services before publishing the post.  It's not a blocker, but a nice
> thing to have.  There is another ongoing work, which I would like to
> finish before making a post.
>
> Another option is to publish this post some time after 1.4.0 release, so
> everything I want will be finished to that moment.  I don't see reasons
> to hurry, so it's a viable alternative too.

I think it’d be ideal to have the post before the release, so users know
what they’re getting.  :-)

It’s completely fine if there are still missing features, etc. IMO;
it’ll keep growing and there can be another post later.

> I burnt out a little during upstreaming process, it was quite slow and
> painful at the beginning and increased maintanance burden of rde for me.
> A little too early merge + uncoordinated changes of basic primitives and
> service configurations also hit me quite hard and forced to spend some
> time bringing rde back to working state without going a step further.
>
> I took a break and after that started to cleanup small Guix Home issues,
> develop/improve home services in rde repo and finally started to work on
> new rde features.  Still feel a little burnt out and I try not to do
> worse.

Oh I’m sorry to read that.  I certainly don’t want to add more on your
plate or to have you feel pressured to do more.

I think we can take our time on this; we can clarify in the manual and
announcement what it is that users are getting when the release is out.

(To be clear, the review process has been a burden on me too, and it’s a
strong commitment from the Guix maintainers going forward.)

[...]

> To continue upstreaming home services from rde to Guix I would like and
> actually need to have an established style guide on how to write service
> configurations to make sure service implementations are consistent.  I
> started to write a manual section, which we can collectively review,
> discuss and adjust it to get such a style guide.  Cause of burn out and
> a lot of unrewarding monkey work I've done recently it's a little hard
> to focus on this task, but I'll try to send first drafts to mailing list
> soon.

Yeah, there’s no style guide, but on the up side, there’s established
practice with system services that hopefully we can follow in most
cases.

Anyway, recovering from burnout and making sure it doesn’t happen again
should be the priority.

Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.