Re: [GSoC] Draft proposal for an Install Wizard for Guix

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Thomas Ingram <taingram@mtu.edu> skribis:

> On 03/26/2016 07:39 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Personally, I would like to view the “wizard” as a helper, and not as
>> something that hides everything and turns people into “end users.”
>>
>> I don’t know how this could translate in the design of the tool.
>> Perhaps showing the ‘operating-system’ declaration as you suggest is one
>> thing, and making it easy to view the section of the manual that
>> corresponds to a particular item, or to jump to the code that defines a
>> specific service (say), would be helpful too.
> Yes as much as it is an installer it should also be an
> introduction. Something that not only lets a user easily input their
> options but also shows them how their settings will be put into
> config.scm, I'm trying to come up with some clever ideas of how to do
> this in a graceful way.

Awesome.

> Basically I was thinking of doing that with an ncurses UI that shows
> the user their config.scm with some documentation and then walks users
> through changing each option. But maybe an emacs installer makes more
> sense as this is the type of interface emacs does very well.
>
> The reason I had avoided proposing an emacs installer previously is I
> worry about confusion from users who are unfamiliar with emacs and how
> to use it. Should we be concerned with that when so many of Guix's
> great features that can be accessed through emacs. Perhaps there could
> be a simple introduction to emacs in the installer as well? On the
> other hand if a user has no experience with emacs throwing that at
> them along with config.scm could be overwhelming.

I understand your concern.

I think that in this case, Emacs should be viewed as a UI toolkit: just
like someone using an ncurses program doesn’t have to learn the ncurses
API, someone using an Emacs-based UI doesn’t have to learn Emacs.

It just happens that Emacs is a full-featured UI toolkit, especially
when it comes to Guix things.  For instance, it already has all we need
to display and navigate source code (from an ‘operating-system’
configuration, one can contextual documentation, jump to
procedure/variable definitions, etc.), to navigate packages, and so on.

Having said that, I think that if you’re more comfortable writing Guile
and ncurses code than Emacs code for this project, then that’s perfectly
fine, of course.

Thanks,
Ludo’.