Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

Hi All!

There's a certain probability that I might make it to Hamburg for 37C3
(Chaos Communication Congress' 37th edition) this year, 27th-30th Dec.

I was wondering if you might be aware of any Guix-related event/session
(talk, assembly, self-organised session, etc) happening at 37C3? I
wasn't able to spot anything when flicking through the event portal⁰.

While I understand we're well past the RfP deadline, there could still
be margin to organise some informal Guix session or get-together. If so,
would anyone be willing to meet up or join forces to organise something?

Thanks, cheers, Fabio.

- 0 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/index

PS: Please keep me in CC if/when replying as I might miss your email
otherwise.

-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Fabio,

Fabio Natali <me@fabionatali.com> writes:

> I was wondering if you might be aware of any Guix-related event/session
> (talk, assembly, self-organised session, etc) happening at 37C3? I
> wasn't able to spot anything when flicking through the event portal⁰.

I won't be at the 37c3, but have regularly attended most chaos
communication congresses of the last decade before, well,
2020. Generally speaking I haven't seen that many Guix related things at
those events; so your best bet would probably be to do a self-organized
session, e.g. some sort of a users meet-up as they're relatively easy to
organize there.

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Tobias Alexandra Platen]

Unfortunately this year I won't make it to the Chaos Communication
Congress, so I'll watch the live steam. But in 2015 I when I lived in
Hamburg, I was part of the Congress.

Tobias Alexandra

Am Montag, dem 11.12.2023 um 21:15 +0100 schrieb Wilko Meyer:
> 
> Hi Fabio,
> 
> Fabio Natali <me@fabionatali.com> writes:
> 
> > I was wondering if you might be aware of any Guix-related
> > event/session
> > (talk, assembly, self-organised session, etc) happening at 37C3? I
> > wasn't able to spot anything when flicking through the event
> > portal⁰.
> 
> I won't be at the 37c3, but have regularly attended most chaos
> communication congresses of the last decade before, well,
> 2020. Generally speaking I haven't seen that many Guix related things
> at
> those events; so your best bet would probably be to do a self-
> organized
> session, e.g. some sort of a users meet-up as they're relatively easy
> to
> organize there.
> 

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

Hi Wilko, hi Tobias Alexandra,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Yeah, a self-organised session is probably the way to go - hopefully
there's still time to register one, when I did one in the past
(unrelated to Guix) I remember it was a pretty much last-minute thing.

I'll keep the list updated if I do make some progress, it'd be great to
get feedback, hope that's alright.

Cheers, Fabio.


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

On 2023-12-11, 21:02 +0000, Fabio Natali <me@fabionatali.com> wrote:
> I'll keep the list updated if I do make some progress, it'd be great
> to get feedback, hope that's alright.

Quick update re 37C3, I ended up registering 3 self-organised sessions -
little more than a placeholder at the minute:

- GNU Guix, an introduction: to cover the basics,
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-an-introduction/

- GNU Guix, a hands-on session: e.g. where participants are invited to
  try Guix on their device if they're interested to do so,
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-hands-on-session/

- GNU Guix, some slightly more advanced topics,
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-something-more-advanced/

I hope that some other Guix user will join me in this, especially to
help with the advanced session, but also to finetune the contents of the
other two sessions.

I hope this will be the opportunity for people who have never seen Guix
in action to get to know the basics and maybe play with it a bit.

If anyone has any idea/feedback - or is planning to also be at Congress
- I'd be delighted to know.

Thanks, cheers, Fabio.


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Matt]

 ---- On Tue, 12 Dec 2023 17:56:04 +0100  Fabio Natali  wrote --- 

 > If anyone has any idea/feedback - or is planning to also be at Congress
 > - I'd be delighted to know.

Hi, I'm new to Hamburg and would like to participate in one of your sessions.  I also see that tickets are €175!  Whoa!  I'm really only interested in connecting with others on Guix.   Maybe there's another time  people in Hamburg could meet up?

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

On 2023-12-12, 18:19 +0100, Matt <matt@excalamus.com> wrote:
> Hi, I'm new to Hamburg and would like to participate in one of your sessions.  I also see that tickets are €175!  Whoa!  I'm really only interested in connecting with others on Guix.   Maybe there's another time  people in Hamburg could meet up?

Hi Matt,

I'm not based in Hamburg and will only be there for 37C3 - but hopefully
someone else in list may see this and get back to you for a non-37C3
local meetup.

All best, Fabio.


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Matt,

Matt <matt@excalamus.com> writes:

> Maybe there's another time people in Hamburg could meet up?

I don't think there's something Guix-specific in Hamburg yet, you could
try reaching out to the local branch of the CCC there and see if anyone
at their local gatherings is interested in it though (I'm not too
familiar with the CCC in Hamburg though, so I won't make any assumptions
on wether or not there'll be folks interested in Guix in particular, but
it may be worth a try).

I've occassionally read about other Guix meetups on here, some of them
being online events, so maybe participating in those could be your best
bet for a social event if there's nothing local. Others than that I've
read here[0] that this years reproducible builds summit was in Hamburg
and another event in Berlin; though I'm not aware of any regular guix
meetups in Germany.

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-09/msg00085.html

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Kristoffer Ström]

> I've occassionally read about other Guix meetups on here, some of them
> being online events.

Taking this opportunity to ask if there's any kind of listing of meetups
anywhere online? I've seen the london one mentioned but not much else.

Personally i would be interested to know if anyone around the Barcelona
area would be interested in meetups.

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Sergio Pastor Pérez]

Kristoffer Ström <kristoffer@rymdkoloni.se> writes:

> Personally i would be interested to know if anyone around the Barcelona
> area would be interested in meetups.

Hello, Kristoffer.

I would be interested on any Guix event within Spain. Preferably on a
well communicated region.

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Fabio,

Fabio Natali <me@fabionatali.com> writes:

> Quick update re 37C3, I ended up registering 3 self-organised sessions

As the 37c3 has ended today, were the sessions fun so far/did everything
go well? Curious to hear how things went and if you were able to reach
new folks interested in Guix at the event.

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

On 2023-12-30, 20:28 +0100, Wilko Meyer <w@wmeyer.eu> wrote:
> As the 37c3 has ended today, were the sessions fun so far/did
> everything go well? Curious to hear how things went and if you were
> able to reach new folks interested in Guix at the event.

Hi Wilko,

Thanks for asking. Indeed I was thinking of writing a short post-37c3
recap to tell about the sessions, so this is a good opportunity.


tl;dr.

Congress (or 37c3) was great fun! We had two Guix self-organised
sessions with very good turnout of participants. There's definitely
interest around the project at Congress. My 2 cents is that we should
think of organising ourselves in an "assembly"⁰ next year, possibly
together with other Lisp projects.


Intro.

We ended up having two Guix self-organised sessions, on Day 1 and Day 3,
as per the following two posts on the 37c3 site:

- Day 1, GNU Guix, an introduction¹
- Day 3, GNU Guix, a hands-on session²

Congress self-organised sessions are non-official sessions that anybody
can register on the event's portal, simply providing a description and
saying when and where to meet up.


Day 1, GNU Guix, an introduction.

The introductory session on Day 1 wasn't so bad, I think. Given the low
level of feedback on the Fediverse I was expecting very few people,
instead I think we were north of 30 participants! (Do I live in a
Fediverse bubble? Yes, I probably do.) We had to improvise a bit,
sitting on the floor in circle and talking as loud as we could given the
noisy environment.

We had a round with everybody briefly explaining their experience with
Guix. Then we mostly went through the following list of introductory
topics.

- Intro 👋
- What's Guix?
    - Functional
    - Transactional
    - Declarative
        - A base system definition
        - Build and run a system definition 1/2
        - A slightly more advanced system definition
        - Build and run a system definition 2/2
        - Using Guix on a VPS
- How it works
    - The Store
    - What's in a package?
    - Package dependencies
- How many packages available?
- Guix environments with guix shell
- Guix for reproducibility
- Guix as a package manager on a foreign distribution
- Guix Home
    - Guix Home in a container
    - A more complicated example
    - Info on the current Guix Home
- How to contribute
- Resources

Luckily I had put together a little web page so everyone could follow
along looking at the website as we were going through the list. Nothing
particularly valuable, but here³ is the source code if anybody wants to
look at the contents in more detail. After the session, people seemed
generally happy and willing to try Guix or experiment with it more.


Day 3, GNU Guix, a hands-on session.

The session on Day 3 was more seriously limited by the same logistic
problem. Without a projector/monitor, no chance of any meaningful
hands-on work and all we could do was a round of "if there's a blocker
that's preventing you from using Guix or from using it more, what is it
and can we do anything about it?".

Some of the problems discussed:

- A participant mentioned a problem when trying to create a Guix package
  for some Python library. They said the number of missing dependencies
  was overwhelming and that they got a bit frustrated. We mentioned
  something about `guix import' but I don't think we did a great job at
  addressing the problem.
- Someone said they had been trying to create a stripped-down version of
  Guix but they got a bit frustrated by some internal dependencies
  (e.g. avahi) that apparently can't be easily removed.
- Someone mentioned some user-experience issue when working on Guix
  packages, e.g. with Geiser and the Guix REPL.

Probably we didn't do a great job at providing answers/solutions. On the
other hand, things would have been much easier if we had been in front
of a monitor or in a context where we could split in small groups and do
some pair-programming. Some of the participants might see this thread
and be willing to provide their feedback too?


Final considerations.

There's definitely interest around Guix at Congress. The turnout at both
sessions was more than I expected. I think we should consider forming a
Congress Assembly next year, either as Guix itself, or possibly joining
forces with other Lispy things? I don't think there was any Emacs
assembly, for example. A Lisp assembly would have a huge potential!

Having an assembly would help tremendously, as we'd be assigned our own
fixed space where organise sessions, etc.

Apologies for the long email. I hope it's useful feedback.

Cheers, thanks, Fabio.


- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress
- 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231042816/https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-an-introduction/
- 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231042326/https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/gnu-guix-hands-on-session/
- 3: https://git.sr.ht/~fabionatali/guix-intro/tree/main/item/main.org


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Matt]

I enjoyed reading the retrospective.  It sounds like people had fun.  I'm sure the ones who asked questions appreciated the opportunity to ask them in person and connect with others in the community.  Thanks for putting it together!  

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Fabio,

Am Mon, Jan 01, 2024 at 01:49:24PM +0000 schrieb Fabio Natali:
> The introductory session on Day 1 wasn't so bad, I think. Given the low
> level of feedback on the Fediverse I was expecting very few people,
> instead I think we were north of 30 participants!

thanks for your report! This is quite amazing. One of the most depressing
experiences at a CCC was when I went to a Lisp assembly, and there were at
most a dozen people around a table, none of whom used the same Lisp
dialect. So gathering so many people around Guix is very encouraging.
And my (admittedly dated) experience seems to indicate that there is not
much point in joining non-existant Lisp forces.

Andreas

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Matt]

 ---- On Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:25:19 +0100  Andreas Enge  wrote --- 

 > And my (admittedly dated) experience seems to indicate that there is not
 > much point in joining non-existant Lisp forces.

I'm not sure what you mean by this statement.

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Fabio Natali]

On 2024-01-18, 14:25 +0100, Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> wrote:
> thanks for your report!

Hey Andreas, thank you for getting back to me.

> This is quite amazing. One of the most depressing experiences at a CCC
> was when I went to a Lisp assembly, and there were at most a dozen
> people around a table, none of whom used the same Lisp dialect.

Haha, yes, I can see how this can very well be a risk!

The advantage of a Lisp assembly is the economy of scale. That'd combine
together various projects that were all massively under-represented at
37c3 - I'm primarily thinking of Guix, Guile, and Emacs as those are the
projects I care about, but there are others too.

If we build enough momentum, we should be able to have decently sized
assembly subgroups - in other words, we should be able to avoid the
twelve-people-that-speak-twelve-different-lisps scenario. :)

What's not ideal with a Lisp assembly is that Guix and Emacs are not
programming languages and, despite related to Lisp, their scope and
ideas transcend - or are partly orthogonal to - Lisp itself.

An other option would be to go the "FOSDEM way" and have a "declarative
and minimalist computing" assembly instead - what do you think?

I still have a slight preference for the Lisp assembly idea, but let's
see what the general feeling/preference is here in the ML. 38c3 won't be
happening any time soon anyway. :)

Thanks, best, F.


-- 
Fabio Natali
https://fabionatali.com

Re: Guix at 37C3 Chaos Communication Congress in late Dec?

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

Am Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 07:22:01PM +0000 schrieb Fabio Natali:
> The advantage of a Lisp assembly is the economy of scale. That'd combine
> together various projects that were all massively under-represented at
> 37c3 - I'm primarily thinking of Guix, Guile, and Emacs as those are the
> projects I care about, but there are others too.

I think that indeed anything that will assemble the Guix and Guile
communities is a good thing! Something to decide by the people who will
attend, for me CCC comes at one of the least convenient times of the year.
All the best in your community building endeavours!

Andreas