unofficial mirror of guix-science@gnu.org 
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>
To: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org, guix-science@gnu.org
Subject: Re: “What’s in a package”
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:20:20 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <875yutwuij.fsf@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87wnnbpgnp.fsf@inria.fr> ("Ludovic Courtès"'s message of "Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:36:58 +0200")

Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> writes:

> Hello Guix!
>
> I and others are often disappointed (or angry!) when looking at the
> weaknesses of the most popular software deployment tools.  I felt that
> acutely after packaging PyTorch last month and felt the need to look
> more closely at what others are doing and to document our motivation,
> having put so much sweat in all these packages:
>
>   https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2021/09/whats-in-a-package/
>
> It’s probably no news to people here, but the packaging approach has a
> direct impact on verifiability, and thus on security and transparency,
> as expected from a scientific process.  The idea is to explain all that
> looking at the contents of packages, in particular for pip and CONDA.
>
> Feel free to share with non-Guix people and to comment!
>
> Ludo’.

I appreciate this post very much. Setting aside questions of freedom, and security -- both of which I value a lot -- the main benefit of Guix has, for me, been: simplicity (but not always ease)[1]. I.e., when trying to achieve a goal, it is a pain to package things that aren't yet packaged, but what I get in return are sane environments, deployments, and meta-data about all of these.

This is perhaps a rehash of the "worse is better"[2] conversation, but I often struggle with deciding whether to do things the "fast" way, or the "correct" way. I think when your path is clear, the correct way will get you farther, faster. But when you're doing experiments, or exploratory programming, being bogged down with the "correct" way of doing things (i.e. Guix packages) might take a lot of time for no benefit. E.g. maybe you end up packaging a cluster of things that you find out don't work out for you. Of course the challenge is: if you choose the fast way, and it works out, do you got back to do it the correct way so that you're on sound footing?

Bringing this back to Guix, and maybe the GNU philosophy, it has been very helpful for me to be able to leverage the flexibility of Guix to occasionally do things the "fast" way, perhaps by packaging a binary. Paradoxically, it has allowed me to stay within the Guix and free software ecosystem. In my opinion, flexibility is key to growing the ecosystem and community, and I would encourage Guix as a project to take every opportunity to give the user options.

[1] - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

-- 
Katherine


  reply	other threads:[~2021-09-21 20:47 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-09-20 12:36 “What’s in a package” Ludovic Courtès
2021-09-21 20:20 ` Katherine Cox-Buday [this message]
2021-09-22 13:32   ` [Spam:]Re: " Konrad Hinsen
2021-09-22 15:02     ` Katherine Cox-Buday
2021-09-22 18:20       ` Konrad Hinsen
2021-09-22 15:44   ` Jonathan McHugh
2021-09-22 19:44   ` zimoun
2021-09-23  7:36   ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-09-23 15:25     ` Katherine Cox-Buday
2021-09-24  9:04       ` Ludovic Courtès

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://guix.gnu.org/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=875yutwuij.fsf@gmail.com \
    --to=cox.katherine.e@gmail.com \
    --cc=guix-devel@gnu.org \
    --cc=guix-science@gnu.org \
    --cc=ludovic.courtes@inria.fr \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).