Re: Looking to contribute

[cinder88@hushmail.com]

On 6/28/2017 at 9:49 AM, "Danny Milosavljevic" <dannym@scratchpost.org> wrote:
>
>Hi and welcome,

Thanks for for the excellent post. It looks like there's a good community here.

>If there are bugs on system update, you can roll back by selecting 
>another entry in the bootloader menu (a new one is created 
>everytime you reconfigure the system).  This includes all the 
>installed packages (!!!!).  So it's pretty much indestructible - I 
>think that this is the killer feature of GuixSD.

Exactly. Currently I run Gentoo with systemd. To manage packages
and configuration, I wrote a script which tracks config files throughout
the system. Then a system-wide recompile with Gentoo updates any
reconfigured software to meet the new config specifications. Effectively
what I'm doing is specifying the state of the system with the config, and
telling Portage (the package manager) to meet the specs. Then I
remembered using NixOS a while back, which had exactly solved that
problem! And when I heard of a Nix-based, libre system using Scheme,
I knew I was home.

>> How can I best contribute?
>
>If you want to install GuixSD there's a "wip-installer" (WIP means 
>"work in progress") branch on git 
><https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git>.  If you just want to 
>test the finished installer please download 
>http://web.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guixsd-graphical-
>installer-x86-64-linux.lz and unpack it by invoking "lzip -d 
>guixsd*.lz".  This results in a disk image that you can flash onto 
>a USB flash drive (don't copy it as a file unto the filesystem on 
>the flash USB drive - rather replace the entire drive by it).
>
>It has quite a few rough edges so don't expect Ubuntu-style 
>usability (yet).
>
>If you do try the installer, it would be good if you noted which 
>areas suck :)

Alright, I will try that and let you all know how it goes.

>I think you should contribute in an area that you care about.  
>There's plenty to do.  For example:
>
>Installer:
>- Currently, the installer invokes the parted executable for 
>partitioning which is quite jarring (it looks very different).  It 
>would be nice if it just used the parted library.  But there's no 
>good guile-parted yet.  I've started hacking on one and it's 
>starting to look OK but it's not done.  If you are interested in 
>that I can upload it somewhere (github, gitlab etc).

I would be happy to work on this.

>Packages:
>- Texlive for a long time was a 2 GB download which was done every 
>time one of the dependencies changed.  It's better now but there 
>are still situations where it does that.  It should be more 
>modular so the downloads aren't that large (and not done as often).

I'd be happy to work on this as well, as I use TeX extensively.

>Some of the areas I work in are mostly bootloader, filesystem and 
>partitioning stuff - which happen to be the areas where I have to 
>be quite careful about not breaking the killer feature.  If you 
>like that anyway, please help us with it :)
>

> What are your interests?

Professionally I do higher-level software design and implementation.
I'm not too used to lower level system details, but by using Gentoo
I've learned a decent amount about how GNU/Linux operates.

I'm a mathematician, which means I'm lazy and want to do things the
right way once so I don't have to do them again. The way that modern
operating systems work, with their one huge environment and no
tracking of state, is insane and unsustainable. (How many times have
I wasted a Saturday morning trying to get audio work on a new Gentoo
install?) Stateless, declarative systems seem to be the obvious way forward.

I'm a big fan of Alan Kay, and one thing he always made clear is that
there should be no separation between the language and the operating
system. I've found that many of the problems which plague modern OSes
are the same which plague C. Which is why a system which sits on top
of Scheme, one of the most powerful programming paradigms we have,
is so appealing.

More concretely, I can be of the most help with:
- Texlive and dealing with pdf stuff (cairo, etc)
- Emacs
- Networking
But realy I'll try to help wherever it's needed, because this project
should be a reality.