Re: Divvying up service definitions

[Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

Hi Bruno,

On Tue, Oct 24 2023, Bruno Victal wrote:

> Further complicating things is
> 'define-maybe', whose use monopolizes the predicate and serializers for
> a particular service definition.

I've dealt with that in the past and support your effort.

> * Splitting this as gnu/services/dovecot.scm.
>   We keep it compatible with 'use-service-modules' at the cost of having
>   a multitude of files under gnu/services, without any logical grouping

The number of services we offer strikes me as sufficiently small for
your "unsorted" scheme to remain easy to navigate.

Also, we already use this scheme for several services---such as rsync,
ssh, vnc, certbot, certbot, cgit, cups, ldap, lirc, sddm, avahi, mcron,
spice, auditd, sysctl, getmail, lightdm, and syncthing. I am not sure
it's worth a long discussion.

Moreover, categorizations are often ambigious and can make it harder to
locate a particular service definition.

While some services may remain narrowly bundled---as they are in nfs,
dbus, herd, hurd, samba, docker, ganeti, and shepherd---categorizations
often exist purely in the eye of the beholder. For example, does
Kerberos belong into its own category, as it does now, or is part of
'authentication', or perhaps 'security'?

In short, I would proceed and split the services if there is no further
comment on your request. It will make development easier.

For a transitional period, we could perhaps provide intermediate modules
in old places which re-export the service definitions that were moved,
but I'm not sure it's really necessary.

Thank you for your clean-up efforts!

Kind regards
Felix