Reviving Emacs-Guix

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> skribis:

> I believe it suffers from 2 main issues:
>
> - Geiser is a strong dependency: everything depends from a well-working
>   Geiser REPL.

That’s a feature!

>   - Geiser 0.12 broke the REPL setup :(
>   - Geiser chokes on large outputs, which happens on any Guix build.  So
>     you can't build anything with emacs-guix.

Not a problem if Emacs-Guix were maintained, IMO.  We can talk to each
other, jao (the Geiser maintainer and primary developer) has always been
responsive and helpful.

> - Emacs-Guix uses private parts of Guix if I'm not mistaken.  Since
>   these parts are prone to change, it breaks Emacs-Guix once in a while.

Once upon a time, Emacs-Guix was part of Guix proper, precisely so we
could make sure both stay in sync.  Alex Kost was doing all the work on
Emacs-Guix and decided to maintain it separately in 2016 (commit
deb6276dda81a69da38e842d269c5370a28fa5cf), even though we knew such
problems could arise.  This has worked well for some time, but now it’s
obviously showing its limit.

> Finally, it seems that Emacs-Guix is mostly unmaintained now:
>
> https://github.com/alezost/guix.el/issues/38#issuecomment-617718043

Oh, that’s sad.  :-/

Any Emacser around willing to take care of it at least in “maintenance
mode”?  It seems like fixing the issues we currently have wouldn’t be
too hard.  Then we can tag a release.

I think it would be beneficial longer-term to have the Emacs-Guix repo
in the Guix group on Savannah, from the perspective of Conway’s law¹;
it’s also probably a safe way for the project to deal with contributor
churn.  But if whoever volunteers prefers to maintain it elsewhere, so
be it!

WDYT?

Ludo’.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law