Re: Composing service definitions (and maybe fmt)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:

> Ludo, you've actually done quite a bit of skribe-style-stuff work! :)
> Do you think this is a good idea?  And what would be the right approach?
> Depending on guile-reader may be a bit heavy for Guix (?), though maybe
> writing a reader macro to do string quasiquoting will not be hard anyway.

I think we don’t want to depend on guile-reader, and I’m rather against
reader macros, except on rare occasions like #' and #~, because they
could interfere with other extensions that people use.

The Skribe syntax is just literal-text-by-default, where

  [foo bar ,baz]

is equivalent to:

  (list "foo bar " baz)

It’s convenient when writing document, but I’m not sure it is so helpful
for config files.  For instance, ‘text-file*’ and ‘mixed-text-file’ get
close to that, but without the reader macro.  See xorg.scm for example.

To me, the question is more about choosing between writing configuration
file bindings and exposing upstream’s configuration file syntax, as was
discussed when Andy posted the Dovecot service.  (To which I don’t have
a better answer than: let’s see on a case-by-case basis.)

WDYT?

But yeah, maybe we need a concrete example to illustrate the various
options.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.