Re: string-append plus package

[Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com>]

Am 19.12.2016 um 14:31 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> I agree!  The first two lines were all you wanted to know; the rest was
> for you as someone who contributes to Scheme—I would not give that
> explanation to someone who’s just trying to get nginx up and running.

My point is a different one: "The worm has to taste good to the fish,
not the fisherman."

GuixSD has a lot of outstanding features from which the system
declarations are one.

To make GuixSD successful – and not just another marginal distribution –
guix must support users and administrator to do there job. Otherwise
they will stay with other distributions. Administrators are typically
short in time and they are not programmes. If they are programming, they
are used to bash, perl, python and other imperative languages. Maybe
they have some experiences with tools like puppet or ansible, which
introduce some declarative paradigm.

Most admins are not used to functional programming nor scheme – and they
don't want to learn yet another language. They may be willing to learn
some patterns, but not to learn the language.

Compared with puppet and ansible, GuixSD system declarations have one
big draw-back already: The later work for GuixSD only, while puppet and
ansible can be used to manage all Gnu/Linux distributions and even Windows.

If now guix is inconsistent to use (see below), or uses some "magic", or
is complicated to learn, administrators will abstain from GuixSD.

So the road to success is based on on simplicity, consistency and no magic.

ATM, system declarations are *not* consistent: While in a package
description (gnu/packages/*.scm) and in service definitions
(gnu/service/*.scm) one can use "(string-append PACKAGE …)", this does
*not* work in system declarations (gnu/system/examples/*.tmpl). From an
administrators point of view, there is no reason for this different
behaviour. it's plain confusing.

Adding on this: I took two weeks (not counting the delay caused on my
side) to get a working answer for the simple question in this thread.
Imagine some admin trying ot GuixSD and being delayed that long. He/she
will just stop evaluating GuixSD.

If GuixSD should become successful, you need to change this.

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |