Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Julien Lepiller]

Hi Guixers!

Thank you for your participation to the Guix Days on this November 22nd.
We were around 60 people at all time, for a total of over 80 people
during the day.  We hope to see you again soon on IRC or the mailing
lists!

Warm thanks to the presenters who did wonders in a very short
timeframe, as well as to our moderators. :-)

The day was really rich for us.  Fruitful discussions happened and it is
always amazing to see the diversity in action.  Hope that you enjoyed!

Since this is the first time we tried to organize an online event,
we know that some things were good, others were bad, and maybe even a
couple were ugly for you.  We want to hear from you.  What did you
enjoy, what should be avoided, what could be improved for next time?

Feel free to pragmatically dream and help us sketch the next event!

You might think of this event as a `--dry-run', and we think it was
very successful.  Let's prepare the `--rounds=2'. ;-)

If any of you have taken some notes during the event, it would be nice
to summarize the discussions that happened in a blog post (and in
`maintenance/doc').

Please drop us an email to guix-devel@gnu.org.  If you are shy, send it
to guix-days@gnu.org, a private alias reaching only the organizers of
the event (Julien Lepiller (roptat) and Simon Tournier (zimoun)) and the
maintainers.

We'd like to address a special thanks to Fosshost, for hosting the
BigBlueButton instance.  It worked amazingly well!

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Arun Isaac]

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Hi,

Guix Day was wonderful. Thank you very much for organizing it! More than
anything, I attended just to see people's faces, and put faces to
names. Seeing smiling faces is surprisingly motivating, especially in
lockdown times. :-)

I'm happy it was an online event and I could participate. I live in
India and travelling to Europe is a bank-breaking endeavour that is
normally out of the question. I think even future offline Guix Days,
after the pandemic, should have an online component so that a wide
audience can participate easily. It's not the same as an actual offline
presence, but it's better than nothing at all.

Thanks, have a nice day!
Arun

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Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

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On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:13:38PM +0530, Arun Isaac wrote:
> I'm happy it was an online event and I could participate. I live in
> India and travelling to Europe is a bank-breaking endeavour that is
> normally out of the question. I think even future offline Guix Days,
> after the pandemic, should have an online component so that a wide
> audience can participate easily. It's not the same as an actual offline
> presence, but it's better than nothing at all.

Yes, absolutely! I do this sort of thing — hybrid events — for my day
job, and I could help make it happen in the future.

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Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[raingloom]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 03:00:56 +0100
Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> wrote:

> Hi Guixers!
> 
> Thank you for your participation to the Guix Days on this November
> 22nd. We were around 60 people at all time, for a total of over 80
> people during the day.  We hope to see you again soon on IRC or the
> mailing lists!
> 
> Warm thanks to the presenters who did wonders in a very short
> timeframe, as well as to our moderators. :-)
> 
> The day was really rich for us.  Fruitful discussions happened and it
> is always amazing to see the diversity in action.  Hope that you
> enjoyed!
> 
> Since this is the first time we tried to organize an online event,
> we know that some things were good, others were bad, and maybe even a
> couple were ugly for you.  We want to hear from you.  What did you
> enjoy, what should be avoided, what could be improved for next time?
> 
> Feel free to pragmatically dream and help us sketch the next event!
> 
> You might think of this event as a `--dry-run', and we think it was
> very successful.  Let's prepare the `--rounds=2'. ;-)
> 
> If any of you have taken some notes during the event, it would be nice
> to summarize the discussions that happened in a blog post (and in
> `maintenance/doc').
> 
> Please drop us an email to guix-devel@gnu.org.  If you are shy, send
> it to guix-days@gnu.org, a private alias reaching only the organizers
> of the event (Julien Lepiller (roptat) and Simon Tournier (zimoun))
> and the maintainers.
> 
> We'd like to address a special thanks to Fosshost, for hosting the
> BigBlueButton instance.  It worked amazingly well!
> 

My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently it's
still pretty heavy.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:26:37PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
> My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
> sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently it's
> still pretty heavy.

Can you say what web browser you were using? Bonus points if you can
give us the exact version, assuming it's from Guix. And what kind of
computer did you use?

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Michael Rohleder]

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raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> writes:
> My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
> sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently it's
> still pretty heavy.

I had a similar issue, but only in the break where we had lots of
webcams: After about 5 or 6 webcams, my (slow) net connection became
satturated and BBB seems to loose more and more
informations/connections/gets out of sync.  After that, audio didn't
work anymore (but was still transmitted) and I had to reconnect/reload.

-- 
There are two reasons why we dont trust people.
First - we dont know them.
Second - we know them.

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Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Arun Isaac]

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Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

> Yes, absolutely! I do this sort of thing — hybrid events — for my day
> job, and I could help make it happen in the future.

Thank you, that is much appreciated!

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Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[zimoun]

Hi Arun,

Thank you for your kind words.


On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 at 21:13, Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> wrote:

> I'm happy it was an online event and I could participate. I live in
> India and travelling to Europe is a bank-breaking endeavour that is
> normally out of the question. I think even future offline Guix Days,
> after the pandemic, should have an online component so that a wide
> audience can participate easily. It's not the same as an actual offline
> presence, but it's better than nothing at all.

For the previous pre-FOSDEM Guix Days 2020 back in Feb., we discussed to
stream part of the event.  On one hand, for the exact same reasons you
explain; on the other hand, streaming could reduce the interactivity or
mitigate the impulse for the attendees to take the floor.  At the end,
technical details spoke by themselves.

I do not know when (or if) physical events such as pre-FOSDEM Guix Days
will happen in the near future.  For sure, the historical place in
Brussels where these pre-FOSDEM Guix Days are organized does not have a
network able to support streaming.

Since this historical place would not change* “soon”, first because we
like it (I speak for myself) and second because it is accommodating,
ideas to deal with poor network are welcome. :-)

Personally, I am lacking imagination for that but I am sure that Guixers
around will find a neat hack to fix it. :-)


All the best,
simon


*change: I have never been part of the organizing team, but that’s my
 feelings.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[zimoun]

Hi Michael,

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 11:47, Michael Rohleder <mike@rohleder.de> wrote:

> I had a similar issue, but only in the break where we had lots of
> webcams: After about 5 or 6 webcams, my (slow) net connection became
> satturated and BBB seems to loose more and more
> informations/connections/gets out of sync.  After that, audio didn't
> work anymore (but was still transmitted) and I had to reconnect/reload.

As Leo asked: Can you say what web browser you were using? Bonus points
if you can give us the exact version, assuming it's from Guix. And what
kind of computer did you use?

Thank in advance.

All the best,
simon

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Michael Rohleder]

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Hi Simon,

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:
> As Leo asked: Can you say what web browser you were using? Bonus points
> if you can give us the exact version, assuming it's from Guix. And what
> kind of computer did you use?

Browser is icecat 78.5.0-guix0-preview1 with all extensions disabled,
except "Surfingkeys".

Computer is something like this (neofetch):

OS: Guix System e16fbddf2b1289ec0f4dcd6d625a73ccdbfd0230 x86_64 
Kernel: 5.9.9 
Uptime: 3 days, 8 hours, 59 mins 
Packages: 65 (guix-system), 286 (guix-user), 5 (flatpak) 
Shell: bash 5.0.16 
Resolution: 1920x1200, 1920x1080, 2560x1080 
DE: Xfce 
Theme: Adwaita-dark [GTK2] 
Icons: Adwaita [GTK2] 
Terminal: xfce4-terminal 
Terminal Font: JetBrains Mono 14 
CPU: Intel i7-4930K (12) @ 3.900GHz 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 
Memory: 2107MiB / 32060MiB 

-- 
Dummheit ist nicht wenig wissen,
auch nicht wenig wissen wollen,
Dummheit ist glauben, genug zu wissen
       Konfuzius

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Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 02:19:17PM +0100, zimoun wrote:
> Since this historical place would not change* “soon”, first because we
> like it (I speak for myself) and second because it is accommodating,
> ideas to deal with poor network are welcome. :-)

The standard solution is to do cellular network bonding, with something
like a LiveU Solo. These cellular data contracts are given priority over
mobile phones. This is actually preferred over "hard-line" internet in
most cases, because the prioritized network access and bonding increase
reliability by several factors.

It can also be cobbled together "by hand" using Linux's networking tools
(after all, this is what the commercial products use) but that's beyond
my expertise. Maybe by FOSDEM 2022 I'll know how to do that.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 06:50:41PM +0100, Michael Rohleder wrote:
> Browser is icecat 78.5.0-guix0-preview1 with all extensions disabled,
> except "Surfingkeys".
> 
> Computer is something like this (neofetch):

[...]

Hm... it seems unlikely that this computer, which is relatively
powerful, couldn't handle it. I suspect a bug in the browser.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[raingloom]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:53:21 -0500
Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:26:37PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
> > My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
> > sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently
> > it's still pretty heavy.  
> 
> Can you say what web browser you were using? Bonus points if you can
> give us the exact version, assuming it's from Guix. And what kind of
> computer did you use?

IceCat, from a recent commit. Couldn't try with Chromium.
version string: 78.4.1-guix0-preview1
store path:
/gnu/store/pzcqndbiwzs1gddlkmsbqalf3r6yfx5d-icecat-78.4.1-guix0-preview1

The hardware has about 4 gigs of RAM, and earlyoom was running, but I
can only see one IceCat related event in its log, but even that might
be unrelated. I can't really tell, because the log has no timestamps.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[raingloom]

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:47:46 +0100
Michael Rohleder <mike@rohleder.de> wrote:

> raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> writes:
> > My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
> > sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently
> > it's still pretty heavy.  
> 
> I had a similar issue, but only in the break where we had lots of
> webcams: After about 5 or 6 webcams, my (slow) net connection became
> satturated and BBB seems to loose more and more
> informations/connections/gets out of sync.  After that, audio didn't
> work anymore (but was still transmitted) and I had to
> reconnect/reload.
> 

Oh yea, regarding that, I really think it would have made a whole lot
more sense if people just sent in a photo, instead of DDoS-ing the
network.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 13:24, Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 06:50:41PM +0100, Michael Rohleder wrote:
>> Browser is icecat 78.5.0-guix0-preview1 with all extensions disabled,
>> except "Surfingkeys".
>> 
>> Computer is something like this (neofetch):
>
> [...]
>
> Hm... it seems unlikely that this computer, which is relatively
> powerful, couldn't handle it. I suspect a bug in the browser.

Thanks Michael.

I suspect a bug in BBB related to slow/weak network.  Well, I do not
know, it is weird.

All the best,
simon

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 23:28, raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:26:37PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
>> > My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4 minutes,
>> > sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but apparently
>> > it's still pretty heavy.  

What do you mean by “reconnect audio”?

Since your browser looks usual, maybe it comes from the configuration of
your audio.  I do not know, just guessing.


All the best,
simon

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 11:31:53PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
> Oh yea, regarding that, I really think it would have made a whole lot
> more sense if people just sent in a photo, instead of DDoS-ing the
> network.

I don't know how BBB works nor did I measure it, but one can expect a
videochat feed to require basically the same amount of bandwidth as
watching a Youtube video.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[raingloom]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:00:17 +0100
zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 23:28, raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:26:37PM +0100, raingloom wrote:  
> >> > My only issue was that I had to reconnect audio every 3-4
> >> > minutes, sometimes having to do a full reload. BBB was nice, but
> >> > apparently it's still pretty heavy.    
> 
> What do you mean by “reconnect audio”?
> 
> Since your browser looks usual, maybe it comes from the configuration
> of your audio.  I do not know, just guessing.
> 
> 
> All the best,
> simon

There is an icon to turn audio on or off.

I'm starting to suspect my IceCat was (and still is) a version behind,
so that might have caused it. (still is because substitutes aren't up
yet)

Gosh, I just love how stable web browsers are. :)))

Why is BigBlueButton slow on GuixSystem (was: Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!)

[Jonathan Brielmaier]

On 25.11.20 19:24, Leo Famulari wrote> On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at
06:50:41PM +0100, Michael Rohleder wrote>> Browser is icecat
78.5.0-guix0-preview1 with all extensions disabled,>> except
"Surfingkeys".>>>> Computer is something like this (neofetch):> > [...]>
 > Hm... it seems unlikely that this computer, which is relatively>
powerful, couldn't handle it. I suspect a bug in the browser.
My educated guess would go more into the decoding with/without hardware
acceleration topic.

In video conferencing clients need to do video encoding (when they use
their webcam) as well as video decoding in real time. This can be pretty
resource hungry (CPU) especially when there is no proper HW acceleration
by the GPU.

Don't make the mistake to compare to YouTube. It's a different situation
because Google does (almost) everything possible to make the decoding
less demanding for the clients. That's not so easy when you do real time
encode+decode.

According to their FAQ[0] 1Mbit/s download and 0,5Mbit/s upload are
recommended.

For audio they seem to use OPUS and VP8 for video with fallback on h264
(not sure if enabled by default).

BBB uses WebRTC quite heavily, maybe that is the key problem. It can be
tested via [1][2].

On Guix System my Firefox has set following params in about:config:
```
gfx.blacklist.webrtc.hw.acceleration.decode.failureid ->
FEATURE_FAILURE_GLXTEST_FAILED
gfx.blacklist.webrtc.hw.acceleration.encode.failureid -> FEATURE...
gfx.blacklist.webrtc.hw.acceleration.h264.failureid -> FEATURE...
```

Maybe VA-API can help[3]...

So far from me
Jonathan

[0]
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html#what-are-the-minimum-requirements-for-the-bigbluebutton-client
[1] https://test.webrtc.org.
[2] https://networktest.twilio.com/
[3]
https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/firefox-81-on-fedora-with-va-api-webrtc-and-x11/

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[raingloom]

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 23:17:57 -0500
Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 11:31:53PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
> > Oh yea, regarding that, I really think it would have made a whole
> > lot more sense if people just sent in a photo, instead of DDoS-ing
> > the network.  
> 
> I don't know how BBB works nor did I measure it, but one can expect a
> videochat feed to require basically the same amount of bandwidth as
> watching a Youtube video.

Since people reported everyone turning their cameras on significantly
degrading performance, that is unlikely to be an accurate analogy.
My guess is that it's more similar to watching N simultaneous streams,
where N is the number of people with active webcams.

Re: Why is BigBlueButton slow on GuixSystem (was: Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!)

[Leo Famulari]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 12:32:07PM +0100, Jonathan Brielmaier wrote:
> In video conferencing clients need to do video encoding (when they use
> their webcam) as well as video decoding in real time. This can be pretty
> resource hungry (CPU) especially when there is no proper HW acceleration
> by the GPU.

Right, hardware accelerated codecs are assumed in 2020. Even the
cheapest mobile phone can do it. It'simply not practical to do in
software real-time without very powerful computers and efficient
implementations.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Leo Famulari]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 03:42:02PM +0100, raingloom wrote:
> Since people reported everyone turning their cameras on significantly
> degrading performance, that is unlikely to be an accurate analogy.
> My guess is that it's more similar to watching N simultaneous streams,
> where N is the number of people with active webcams.

Again, I don't know the architecture of BBB, but the "right way" to
handle multiple streams is for the server to reduce the bitrate of each
stream so that the overall bitrate is constant.

I recommend checking if IceCat is using hardware accelerated encoding.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:13:38PM +0530, Arun Isaac wrote:
> Guix Day was wonderful. Thank you very much for organizing it! More than
> anything, I attended just to see people's faces, and put faces to
> names. Seeing smiling faces is surprisingly motivating, especially in
> lockdown times. :-)

I can only second that - it is even nicer to meet in person, but this
was a really social event online.

> I'm happy it was an online event and I could participate. I live in
> India and travelling to Europe is a bank-breaking endeavour that is
> normally out of the question. I think even future offline Guix Days,
> after the pandemic, should have an online component so that a wide
> audience can participate easily. It's not the same as an actual offline
> presence, but it's better than nothing at all.

Hybrid events are probably quite difficult to organise, but others with
more knowledge on the topic have already spoken up. What we could do in
any case, lockdown or not, is provide for *both* online events such as
this one and, once it is possible again, offline/hybrid events.

Thanks to Julien and Simon for all the work they have invested and to
Fosshost for hosting the videoconference.

Andreas

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 09:13:38PM +0530, Arun Isaac wrote:
>> I'm happy it was an online event and I could participate. I live in
>> India and travelling to Europe is a bank-breaking endeavour that is
>> normally out of the question. I think even future offline Guix Days,
>> after the pandemic, should have an online component so that a wide
>> audience can participate easily. It's not the same as an actual offline
>> presence, but it's better than nothing at all.
>
> Yes, absolutely! I do this sort of thing — hybrid events — for my day
> job, and I could help make it happen in the future.

That’d be nice!  I expect this will become a necessity anyway as more of
us will start avoiding intercontinental travels.  It’s also an
opportunity: we could have events hosted by a variety of people, not
just people from Western Europe.

Ludo’.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

I too really enjoyed the day and the talks!  Speakers did wonders like
you wrote, but I think you, Simon, and Leo also did an amazing job
getting that event up and running, thumbs up!  Many thanks to Fosshost
and to those who helped make that happen behind the scenes.

Despite being a first experience, the live event went very smoothly (for
me at least, with ungoogled-chromium), it was great to see faces during
the break :-), and the discussions were all exciting for me.  I agree
it’d be great to have a blog post summarizing the event while it’s
fresh, even if it’s concise because we were all busy listening and
chatting instead of taking notes.

I like the idea of having per-topic sub-rooms next time, presumably for
a few select “hot topics”.  Some people asked whether a recording of the
live event was available, and I think it might be a good idea to do that
too.

Ludo’.

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[zimoun]

Hi Ludo,

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 11:57, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Despite being a first experience, the live event went very smoothly (for
> me at least, with ungoogled-chromium), it was great to see faces during
> the break :-), and the discussions were all exciting for me.  I agree
> it’d be great to have a blog post summarizing the event while it’s
> fresh, even if it’s concise because we were all busy listening and
> chatting instead of taking notes.

The blog post is coming…  Writing depends on the materials at hand; for
now nothing.

Could you send your Org file to guix-days? Because I only noted the
items that interested me.  Well, I volunteer to add words because it is
worth, IMHO.  Nothing is written on stone but from my point of view, it
is good to specify where Guix is eager to go more or less and especially
helpful for the future when looking back. :-)

BTW, initially the idea was to publish in this very blog post the links
of the talks on audio-video.gnu.org.  But, I am confused how to upload
them and the GNU folks behind have not answered to my email.  Anyway, it
is not a blocking and will be added later.


> I like the idea of having per-topic sub-rooms next time, presumably for
> a few select “hot topics”.  Some people asked whether a recording of the
> live event was available, and I think it might be a good idea to do that
> too.

When preparing, we discussed per-topic sub-room but the implementation
was vague.  Now, it is clearer, so definitively for the next one. :-)

About not recording, it was a conscientious choice.  We discussed it and
we agreed that not-recording seems more in the usual “unconference” Guix
style; especially discussions are freer when the words are not saved for
eternity and so take the floor should be less impressive.

Let revisit this topic for the next events.


All the best,
simon

Re: Thank you for participating in the Guix Day!

[Ludovic Courtès]

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Hi!

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 11:57, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Despite being a first experience, the live event went very smoothly (for
>> me at least, with ungoogled-chromium), it was great to see faces during
>> the break :-), and the discussions were all exciting for me.  I agree
>> it’d be great to have a blog post summarizing the event while it’s
>> fresh, even if it’s concise because we were all busy listening and
>> chatting instead of taking notes.
>
> The blog post is coming…  Writing depends on the materials at hand; for
> now nothing.

Sorry for the delay (don’t hesitate to ping me on IRC when that
happens :-)).

> Could you send your Org file to guix-days? Because I only noted the
> items that interested me.  Well, I volunteer to add words because it is
> worth, IMHO.  Nothing is written on stone but from my point of view, it
> is good to specify where Guix is eager to go more or less and especially
> helpful for the future when looking back. :-)

Attached are my (and Maxim’s) Guix Days notes for the “road map”
session, FWIW.

I agree a blog post with a recap would be/have been nice.

> BTW, initially the idea was to publish in this very blog post the links
> of the talks on audio-video.gnu.org.  But, I am confused how to upload
> them and the GNU folks behind have not answered to my email.  Anyway, it
> is not a blocking and will be added later.

Do you know exactly where it’s blocking?  Did you try filing a “support
request” under <https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/audio-video>?

Alternatively, we could keep videos on our infrastructure, but we’ll
have to make sure to set up backups and mirrors.  Chris Baines is
looking into that for the web site so that could be part of that effort.

If someone’s willing to help on setting up a web site backup, let’s
talk!

> When preparing, we discussed per-topic sub-room but the implementation
> was vague.  Now, it is clearer, so definitively for the next one. :-)
>
> About not recording, it was a conscientious choice.  We discussed it and
> we agreed that not-recording seems more in the usual “unconference” Guix
> style; especially discussions are freer when the words are not saved for
> eternity and so take the floor should be less impressive.

Alright, makes sense to me; it’s a tradeoff and being able to have
informal off-the-record discussions is nice.  Another option would be to
have a mixture of off-the-record discussions (like the real-life
“hallway track”, coffee breaks, etc.) and recorded Q&A/panel
discussions.

Thanks,
Ludo’.


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#+TITLE: The ways forward
#+STARTUP: hidestars

* tentative road map for 1.2.0

  [[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-04/msg00400.html][Medium-term road map (Apr. 2020)]]

* What's Guix?

** dependable
** liberating
*** not just FSDG
*** also helps users master complexity
*** empower users
** hackable
*** no programming language barrier
*** no need for a PhD in category theory
** high quality
*** a curated package distribution
*** community rules and QA
*** requirements not found elsewhere: build from source, unbundle, reproducible builds, bootstrap

* the things that suck
** performance
*** `guix pull' ("Computing guix derivation")
*** substitute downloads
*** broken CI (see Mathieu's talk)
*** UI glitches
**** guix shell at last!
**** search by file name (Pierre)
*** creating union directories is slow
** easier ways to work on a channel
** package size
*** deal with locales (e.g., coreutils)
** year-old bugs :-)
* the corners we cut
** build system gexp
** daemon in Scheme
** source location maps for staged code
** shepherd on Fibers (?): socket activation, etc.
* the future
** GNU/Hurd (-> janneke)
** substitutes over P2P (-> Chris Webber)
** new package definitions: no labels in inputs fields
** POLA: `guix run', --with-pola-wrapper
** 'guix hack' to work on a package?
** transparent import of packages from third-party repos?
** modularized package collection?
*** easier to hack on them, no longer different from other channels
*** more scalable (build times)
** time travel tested, formalized?
** guix environment --fhs  (file hierarchy standard)
** guix pack --format .deb|.rpm|...
** adding the missing GNU packages to the GNU Guix collection
** scalable workflows, recruiting more contributors (-> Chris Baines)
** outreach: functional deployment for everyone, not just geeks!
*** doc, translated
*** polished UI
*** graphical installer ✓
*** graphical UI (Danny)
*** graphical system UI à la YunoHost
*** blogging, training!
** CPU and power efficiency