Re: Enterprise Guix Hosting?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Phil,

Phil <phil@beadling.co.uk> skribis:

> Comments inline.  I'm also aiming to be at the Guix 10 Year thing in
> Paris - sadly only for the Friday, so happy to discuss this informally
> there too!

Looking forward to chatting there!

[...]

> Whilst I like Guix's own documentation, some developers did feedback to
> me that it was to complex for people who just wanted to get-on and use
> Guix, rather than setup, understand and maintain Guix.  So this is the
> area I ended-up documenting - "Guix Up-and-running for Python
> Developers". One day I'd like to publish it properly, but it's very much
> a WIP at the moment!

Publishing such a document (either standalone or as part of the
cookbook) would be great; it’d certainly be a gentle way to get started
for many developers out there.

> One advantage I did have is that I rewrote the CI/CD system
> to work around Guix, and the old system was showing it's age, so people
> were happy to trade Python venvs, for a better build and deployment experience.

Yes, that too is a use case that we should document better (some years
ago I used Guix at work for CI, testing a piece of C++ code under a
variety of configurations—tedious to do without Guix.)

> We now have 5 developers working at least part of the time writing
> Guix packages, or tweaking small bits of the Guix core code (I keep
> meaning to make more of an effort to get our efforts back into Guix
> proper!).  As more developers slowly try-out more advanced stuff in Guix
> this number is growing, and most developers that invest the time end up
> liking Guix - so I think there's plenty of hope to grow it further!

Neat!

[...]

> 3 things which lowers the barrier to entry in my experience commercially
> would be:
>
> - Push button WSL support (I know this has some momentum eg
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-patches/2022-08/msg00945.html).
>   At the moment I tend to use a custom image I made which is just WSL on
>   top of Ubuntu.  I have made it work with busybox, but it's not yet
>   robust enough to wheel out over the enterprise like this.
> - Perhaps a set of videos aimed directly at converting a vanilla Python
>   environment into one running in Guix.  Try to entice the communities
>   off their current tooling by making it as easy as possible to switch.
>   I even went as far as writing a requirements file to guix package
>   converter at work to help with this.
> - Excellent Javascript support would help.  I'm aware of some of the
>   difficulties this presents Guix, and am not a fan of npm, etc - but
>   it's so often used by developers I think not having support for it is
>   always going to be tricky to sell to a wider audience.

This is sorted in order of increasing difficulty (maybe exponentially
increasing, even :-)) but yes, these sound like good action items.

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.