Andrew Tropin schreef op wo 26-01-2022 om 11:36 [+0300]:
> In addition to the problems I mentioned above:
> 
> 1. Mixed usage of two configuration languages (nginx-conf and lisp).
> 2. Having a string, which should be properly escaped (luckily for
> this
> example it's not a problem).

Mixing two configuration languages can be avoided by supporting
everything with records.

> 
> we also:
> 
> 3. Have to implement our own templating engine (using format function
> in this case) to share the values from guile with the config.

This seems to be the same for this list based configuration system
and record based configuraiton system; for the nginx example you gave,
all these lists with parentheses need to turned into something with
brackets that nginx understands anyway.

> 4.1. Don't know where extra-content goes. (It goes to http section
> not the
> end of the file, so we have to start with "}" to get a correct
> configuration).

Can be solved by adding missing options to the Guix service definition
(and documentation) when the need arises.

> 4.2. Don't control where it must be placed. (Can be important in
> other
> use cases, which I can share if needed).

Likewise.

> 5. Have inconsistent implementation of extra-config, extra-content,
> raw-lines
> and other escape hatches (We need to learn it everytime we write a
> new
> service configuration).

Likewise.

Also, the mapping of upstream configuration files to lists in Guix
seems far from obvious to me: in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52698,
how am I supposed to know that 'us,ru' must be a symbol, why isn't
it a string?  If one of the strings for some property includes a
special character from the configuration language (say, '$'),
should it be escaped in Guix ((bindsym ... "[class=\"$100 dollars\"]"
...) or (bindsym ... "[class=\"\\$100 dollars\""]""))?

Why (bindsym ... "[class=\"foo\"]") instead of
(bindsym ... (= class "foo"))?

Why (bindsym ... exec emacsclient ...) and not
(bindsym ... exec (file-append emacs "/bin/emacsclient) ...)?
How am I supposed to know whether emacs is in the path or not,
and if it is, is this merely an implementation detail?

How would  I know if it's (bindsym ... exec emacsclient -c --eval
"'(eshell)'") or (bindsym ... "exec emacsclient -c --eval
\"'(eshell)'\"")?  Since the idea is to keep as close to the
configuration language as possible, shouldn't it be the second?

Why lists and not vectors?

Greetings,
Maxime.