Re: Guix Jargon File (WAS: Rethinking propagated inputs?)

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 05.09.2021, 16:54 +0200 schrieb Bengt Richter:
> Hi Liliana,
> 
> Thank you for starting this renamed thread (as I should have done).
> 
> I think a people who are just looking at _maybe_ installing guix
> should have an easy way to look up terms they haven't seen before.
Personally speaking, the manual and cookbook lend themselves easily to
grepping (and it turns out you acknowledge that later on yourself), but
of course they only reference what Guix *has*, i.e. inputs and native-
inputs, not what it doesn't have, e.g. the Gentoo distinction between
DEPEND and BDEPEND.

> But really I am more interested in promoting the idea of a snippet-
> quoting convention modeled on a subset of mime email standards.
> 
> Very simple, but capable of containing and transferring anything
> unambiguously (if not always with efficient transmission encodings).
> 
> We can of course already do that with signed and attached files, and
> we can archive them and retrieve them, but I am interested in
> retrieving little pieces and making it easy to mark things in
> arbitratry contexts (like this email or a cannibal-friendly program
> source) so that simple snarfing utilities will be able to extract
> snippet-quote info based on tags and identifiers or anything
> in the headers or content per search options much like for any search
> engine.
Both the mailing lists and IRC channel are already archived, so what
you would need to do is simply to collect the funniest quotes and
publish them somewhere, perhaps with links back for context.  As for
tag-based lookup mechanisms, those already exist in the wild as well,
you don't particularly need to reinvent the wheel.

What I don't really understand from all this is for one, what purpose
this Jargon file would serve, and for another, who you would want to
collaborate it.  For all its explanatory power, I do think a manual
would be better suited most of the time if we're talking about serious
definitions of important concepts.

> This is to create a simple contribution mechanism as well as a format
> for retrieval.
> 
> I have seen many code snippets from developers that are tutorial
> material as well as practical how-tos for debugging and browsing
> guix.
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice if they were snip-quoted so that we could extract
> them from mail archives in a better way than searching the raw
> archives, or having to browse though treads and extract nuggets by
> hand?
Possibly, though your particular suggestion is probably more fun if
you're used to writing mail headers by hand than using a GUI client
which mostly hides such things for you (I personally haven't switched
to using Emacs for my mail yet, and I think integrating it with EDS or
even just GOA might take some while).

> simply:
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> header part, ending with blank line
> 
> optional content part, encoded and delimited or referenced per header
> info
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> 
> The header part could start with just prefixing GX- like the optional
> custom header X- prefix described in mime rfcs, and we could borrow
> whatever was useful.
X- exists for a reason, so you should make that X-SOMEID-KEY, where
SOMEID uniquely labels your scheme.  Or who knows, maybe some scheme
already exists out there and you don't need to create a new one.

> BTW, I know "info guix|grep -i whatever" often gives clues about
> whatever, for pursuing "C-s whatever" once inside "info guix
> whatever", but though concept and api indices are great, they are not
> a Jargon File, and not as handy for an outsider :)
I always thought jargon files to be insider humor?  Did I miss
something?  Like, obviously you can read them as an outsider, but you
won't have a clear understanding of what is actually said by having a
bunch more definitions in the back of your head.  To me that sounds
like learning a language with nothing but a dictionary, or worse a
thesaurus.