Re: GNU Guix 1.4.0 released

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de>]

indieterminacy <indieterminacy@libre.brussels> writes:

> On 03-01-2023 10:08, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hi!
>> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:
>> 
>>> Congrats, and yay!  It's a hell of a release! :-) Let's try to make more
>>> punctual ones from now on, and also try to lower the amount of manual
>>> labor producing one incurs (by streamlining the process), as speaking
>>> for me, this was one of the reasons I kept putting it back.
>> Definitely, let’s see how we can make the process smoother.
>> In my experience though, a lot of the work is coordination: keeping
>> track of what needs to be done, open bugs, calling for testing, etc.
>> I think we should start thinking about the next release, forming a
>> small release team, and I’ll be happy to mentor!
>> Thanks,
>> Ludo’.
>
> Out of curiosity, have you ever approached developing a release from the
> perspective of doing documentation first?
>
> For example, test driven approaches like BDD or TDD have allowed the
> expectations and examples to be worked out first and the the implementation
> built to form it.
>
> More practically, theres a recent thread concerning different approaches and
> priorities concerning syntaxes. Also, if during 1.5 there were articulations
> regarding how existing behaviour does not conform with desired behaviour then it
> may become easier to divide up tasks into chunks for teams or individuals to
> work on.
>
> With idealised documentation in place this could provide a point of motivation
> for developers and avoid any fatigue once the solution is in place as the
> /drudgery/ of explaining how things work and how they can be used had been
> worked out in advance.

What areas does guix need more documentation?  To answer that question
for myself, I might say more gexp examples.  Though unmatched-paren is
working on a series of blog posts to dive really deep into that topic.

> In any case, while I cannot comment on the tactics within the OpenBSD community
> I always considered it a noble thing that no improvements we put into their OS
> until the features were correctly documented.
>

While OpenBSD does a pretty good job of documenting everything, I would
also chime in and say that Guix does a fantastic job of translating the
existing documentation into other languages. What do we have
documentation in English, German, French, and significant parts in
Russian and some asian languages. That's pretty stellar!

>
> Thanks everybody with your work on 1.4.0 !