Re: First impressions from delving into Guix

[Lulu <me@erkin.party>]

> On 2020-10-11 14:46 zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What do you mean?  What do you feel that is missing?

This one was a mistake on my part; I thought the module layout was much more
rigid than it actually is, due to informal conventions, and the Emacs-style
Commentary and Code sections threw me off. :-P

> Do you have a wording suggestion?

Hmm, you could say outright in the beginning of "(guix)System Configuration"
that configuration isn't kept in specific magic files, unlike most other
operating systems, and that configuration happens atomically and endures until
the next reconfiguration. (So that's what instantiation means here!)

Other operating systems I've used that had a unified high-level CLI over
existing system configuration still had configuration files to be parsed at
startup, so I was a bit lost. :-)

> If you have time, I would be interested by these issues; if you remember.

Someone in #guix said the SELinux policy module dated to Fedora 23 times, so
that's probably why. (I was on Fedora 31.)
 
> What do you mean?  “guix show guile” lists all the available versions.
> 
> Which Guile have you patched?  The Guile that Arch provides, right?
 
Arch doesn't provide a Guile 3.0 package and the user-provided script on AUR is
broken, so I had to patch that to get it to play nice with the native package
manager. I'm not quite sure why but my attempts at introducing Guile into the
environment through Guix failed. I'll try again later to investigate.

> So I am not convinced that the “and” is really required. ;-)  But “more
> is less”. :-)
 
Ah, that makes sense. I tried the -utf8- one at first, then installed the other
one. Now I see!

> I suggest to read [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and try to package something.
> Easy and good candidates for first packages are CRAN or BioConductor
> packages:
>
> You can pick unpackaged one from the list [8].  Do not hesitate to ask
> me if you do not find an obvious one –– it should a good occasion to
> show you “guix repl”. :-)

Sure thing! But shouldn't I finish the Git log subcommand first? Or should I
leave it to last?

--
Lulu