Re: Layout of ‘define-configuration’ records

[Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

>> Moving the field last is problematic as we’ve seen for any user that
>> uses ‘match’ on records—something that’s not recommended but still
>> used a lot.

Some feedback I hope is useful:

I'm one such newbie, and had to stumble my way into discovering why some
of my services suddenly broke. All I had to go on was with "invalid
G-expression input" at a location in an `operating-system` declaration.

Initially, because of the reference to gexps, I thought something had
changed with `local-file` which I am using to deploy source code off of
a local branch. Through trial and error and reading git logs, I
discovered this was not the case, and saw that `define-configuration`
had changed. From there I was able to discover the problem.

> Yep. I had that on mind when I made the change, though I still missed
> a few occurrences.

I came looking for an announcement of this change somewhere on a mailing
list (info-guix maybe?) or the Guix blog but couldn't find anything. I
understand the focus is on in-repo code, but could we consider
announcing changes which might affect channels and such? I don't always
have time to stay up to date with the changes to the project :(

-- 
Katherine