Emacs and Guix (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 14:09, MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> wrote:

> when its the same people that push Emacs as the "blessed" way to 
> contribute (as in the guix manual)

Just to point 1. Guix is part of GNU – for the good, the bad and the
ugly – so 2. editors developed under the GNU umbrella are autopromoted –
GNU Emacs is one, GNU nano would be another one.  Well, for what it is
worth, I feel such autopromotion as some consistency.

BTW, Efraim is GNU Guix co-maintainer and demoed the use of Vim for Guix
development:

    https://10years.guix.gnu.org/video/using-vim-for-guix-development/

Somehow, when one co-maintainer publicly demoed using not-Emacs makes a
point that there is no “blessed“ editors – and the part dedicated for
Emacs in the manual seems just an autopromotion of GNU products that
contributors enjoy for cooking – dogfooding. ;-).

Contributions in the Guix manual or in the cookbook about how to setup
other editors than Emacs are very welcome.


> The problem part is the way you dismissed the persons experience as 
> "bollocks".

From where I stand, I feel a lot of negative rants, coming from
frustration or generating frustration.  The best against frustration,
from all sides, is to send positive feedback for being engaging and thus
unlock or tackle concrete issues.  Well, my 2 cents. :-)


Last, in all what I am reading in this thread or elsewhere about the
relationship between Emacs and Guix or between Guix and Emacs, I have
the bad taste that a part of the Guile manual had been lost in
translation:

    The Emacs Thesis

    The story of Guile is the story of bringing the development experience
    of Emacs to the mass of programs on a GNU system.

    [...]

    After the Emacs experience was appreciated more widely, a number of
    hackers started to consider how to spread this experience to the rest of
    the GNU system. It was clear that the easiest way to Emacsify a program
    would be to embed a shared language implementation into it.

    https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/The-Emacs-Thesis.html

Guix is this GNU System, isn’t it?

And then Ludo explicitly expressed such goal for Guix [1]: « What about
following that Emacs meme for a complete distro? That's what the GNU
Guix project has been trying to answer. »

Emacs principles and design are part of the Guix DNA.  Part of the DNA
does not mean twin, it means share some relative.  Emacs is not a
mandatory tool for contributing, obviously not!  The point is that many
of us are seeing a continuum between Emacs and Guix for doing their
computations and similarly as I am promoting Guix because it has
radically changed my view of package and system management, I am also
promoting Emacs because it has radically changed my view of interacting
with computers.  Because both are rooted in the same principles.

IMHO, this explains the place of Emacs in the Guix ecosystem.  Many
contributors had or still share this point of view between Emacs and
Guix.  And it is up to people that are not sharing « The Emacs Thesis »
to promote their tools; free software is not about consuming a product
but about sharing what you have.

1: https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/the_emacs_of_distros/


Cheers,
simon