From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Danny Milosavljevic Subject: Re: [GSoC] Draft proposal for an Install Wizard for Guix Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2016 12:53:56 +0100 Message-ID: <20160323125356.1624e453@scratchpost.org> References: <56F1AEF0.60304@mtu.edu> <87lh59r30e.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:44220) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aihMU-0007GC-JS for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2016 07:54:07 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aihMP-00015n-Jz for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2016 07:54:06 -0400 In-Reply-To: <87lh59r30e.fsf@gmail.com> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Chris Marusich Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org, GNU Summer Of Code workers > One more thing to consider. While you write this installer, you might > want to think about how we can make the installation process itself as > reproducible as possible. One of Guix's features is reproducible > software builds. Shouldn't GuixSD also make it possible to reproduce > the process of partitioning the system's disks, making its filesystems, > and configuring the system for the first time? Yeah, personally I'd like to have an emacs form which just displays config.scm (and stores it as a normal file) and has some inline documentation on what is what and maybe a treeview instead of visible S-Expression parens - and a validation process whether the stuff makes sense. When you exit, it just instantiates the system. The partitioning & file system type should also be specified in a declarative way in the config [and arguably it already is]. Basically not a lot different from now but just more user-friendly and catching more mistakes before instantiation. ncurses actually isn't as flexible - although it has the benefit that the average user is familiar with how it looks. But it's just my preference, of course.