From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hartmut Goebel Subject: Re: string-append plus package Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2017 16:34:33 +0100 Message-ID: References: <20161208195647.GA23449@jasmine> <87h9608d3l.fsf@gnu.org> <42bb5a6c-6a7c-c348-d9d0-da83805cdffe@crazy-compilers.com> <87oa0859lo.fsf@gnu.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:60471) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cNi9u-0008Sr-Bz for help-guix@gnu.org; Sun, 01 Jan 2017 10:34:55 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cNi9q-0000gv-Dv for help-guix@gnu.org; Sun, 01 Jan 2017 10:34:54 -0500 In-Reply-To: <87oa0859lo.fsf@gnu.org> List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-guix-bounces+gcggh-help-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Help-Guix" To: =?UTF-8?Q?Ludovic_Court=c3=a8s?= Cc: help-guix@gnu.org 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 |