Re: SSH service for Guix Home

[Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in>]

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

> Hi Andrew,
>

Hi Ludovic!

> One service I miss for Guix Home is ‘home-ssh-service-type’, which is
> in the “original” Guix Home.
>
> Could you contribute a patch adding it?  (I could do it on your behalf,
> but it sounds more logical to let you handle it.)

Yep, I'll try to do it soon.

>
> 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.

>
> Last, it’d be great to see the three of you (and more people!) back in
> action regarding Guix Home.  I understand that life sometimes gets in
> the way, but it seems that there’s been some confusion as to how to go
> forward—e.g., <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/51359#2>—which may partly
> explain why things stalled.  If there are patches waiting for review,
> also don’t hesitate to ping!

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.


Now to more technical details:

When I started to work on Guix Home I explored different system services
configurations and tried to extract some common patterns, it was
relatively hard, cause of implementation inconsistencies.  I wrote
notes, extracted most common patterns and come with some approach for
writing service configurations.  During development of Guix Home it was
slightly changed, but most of the home service implementations are
consistent.

gexp -> file-like change done in Guix repo for shell service
configurations and text-config type partially breaks the ideas I have
about how services should be implemented.

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.

So there is some work happening, but maybe not so visible.


Sorry for being not very active on ML recently, hope after core-updates
merged now you have a little more free time, so we can faster reach the
agreement on service implementation style guide and more people will be
able to contribute high quality services for both Guix System and Guix
Home.

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

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