Re: Drafting a Guix blog post on the FHS container

[John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com>]

Hi again!

On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 03:53 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Hello!
>
> John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com> skribis:
>
>> First, let's dive right into a big one: the popular VSCodium editor. This is a freely
>> licensed build of VS Code: <https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist>
>>
>> This comes in AppImage format. Downloading it and making it executable (with a 'chmod
>> +x') I can run it in a container as
>>
>> guix shell -CNF -D ungoogled-chromium gcc:lib \
>>      --preserve='^DISPLAY$' --preserve='^XAUTHORITY$' --share=$XAUTHORITY \
>>      --preserve='^DBUS_' --expose=/var/run/dbus \
>>      --expose=/sys/dev --expose=/sys/devices --expose=/dev/dri \
>>      -- ./VSCodium-1.74.0.22342.glibc2.17-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run
>
> The code in that AppImage is free software, right?
>

The usual disclaimer of IANAL, but I linked to the part of their readme which describes the project licensing. So it seems all free to me, similar maybe to ungoogled-chromium: all the source without the telemetry and non-free branding, etc. But please do check.

>> Another example is to get the latest nightly builds of Rust, via <https://rustup.rs/>
>
> That’s a nice one too!
>
>> Happy to try other examples and to hear feedback on these!
>
> I think these are two good examples, likely to correspond to the kind of
> thing people may want to try.
>

Great, thanks!

>>> Actually you can use or get inspiration from this animated GIF if you
>>> like:
>>>
>>>   <https://web.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/tmp/guix-shell-fhs.gif>
>>>
>>
>> Either I forgot to save this or wasn't able to access it before, and can't access it
>> now.
>
> Yeah, the TLS setup on that machine is broken, so you’d have to “Accept
> the risk and continue”; I sent you a copy off-list.
>

Thank you. I included it but realize now I forgot to add credit, so I can do that later.

> If we release on Monday, it would be great to have it published…
> tomorrow (Friday).  Otherwise next Friday maybe?
>

It has gotten crazy here this week, hence my slow response (and not using my new found commit powers yet!). I've just sent the draft post which is the previous version with changes you suggested and a slightly expanded version of the examples from my previous message.

<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/60112>

I did some manual tweaking to the markdown export but I think it should look okay. Wasn't sure about the footnotes or if that should just be in-text. Oh, and now realized may want it with a fill column rather than long lines. (It always wraps nicely on my Emacs setup so I forget.)

I should be able to make quick edits tomorrow (it is very late here now), but we don't need to rush if there are other changes or checks anyone wants to make. I can also record some screen grabs if that is helpful.

> Thanks!
>
> Ludo’.

Thanks for the input, wish I had some more time this past week to have gotten this done earlier.

John