Re: Introducing Guix "Features"! (Was: Syntactic Diabetes)

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

> for an average unix user a service is a process that is running in the
> backgroud, doing stuff mostly without any user interaction. you can
> try to argue this away, but i'm afraid that this is the state of
> things.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to aim to satisfy some presumed “average
unix user”, because such a user would not be familiar with many concepts
introduced by Guix (e.g. “guix shell” or “guix system”).

The manual defines system services by referencing users’ expectations:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
11.18.1 Service Composition
---------------------------

Here we define a “service” as, broadly, something that extends the
functionality of the operating system.  Often a service is a process—a
“daemon”—started when the system boots: a secure shell server, a Web
server, the Guix build daemon, etc.  Sometimes a service is a daemon
whose execution can be triggered by another daemon—e.g., an FTP server
started by ‘inetd’ or a D-Bus service activated by ‘dbus-daemon’.
Occasionally, a service does not map to a daemon.  For instance, the
“account” service collects user accounts and makes sure they exist when
the system runs; the “udev” service collects device management rules and
makes them available to the eudev daemon; the ‘/etc’ service populates
the ‘/etc’ directory of the system.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Shepherd takes care of monitoring daemons and the like, but services
provided by the system (in the sense of system facilities) don’t have to
be daemons.

-- 
Ricardo