Re: [Proposal] The Formal Methods in GNU Guix Working Group

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

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Hi Ludo’, all,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello!
>
> (Cc: maintainers.)
>
> Brett Gilio <brettg@gnu.org> skribis:
>
>> Dec 30, 2019 3:34:22 PM Ludovic Courtès :
>>
>>> Guix-HPC is “institutional”, that’s part of the reason behind this.
>>> Regarding gitlab.inria.fr, that’s because it used to be hosted at Inria.
>>> Also, is a channel developed
>>> by colleagues at Inria, so it’s more convenient to have it there.
>>
>>
>> Hey Ludo, thanks for the explanation.
>>
>> It makes sense why Guix-HPC lives somewhere else. Given this, what
>> do you propose for initiating the conversation on where the formal
>> methods haunt page should live with the other maintainers? I
>> personally think the repository should live on Savannah, but the
>> address needs to be discussed.
>
> It’s fine to host the repo on Savannah: we can ask for a new repo under
> the Guix umbrella, the downside being that access control will be the
> same as for the other repos (we can only grant access to all the repos
> or none of them.)  If you plan to open it more to formal methods people
> that do not yet contribute to Guix, it might be easier to use a separate
> repo.  You tell us!
>

Right.  Thinking about this, as I see it right now I think our use cases
for repos fall roughly into two categories:

- Closely Guix-related or small standalone things: this could be things
  like the Haunt sources for our site, or a Guix channel for additional
  package definitions, or anything closely related to Guix and/or small
  enough to fit under the Guix umbrella just fine.  For these, we should
  be able to get by with a very small number of repos in the short and
  long term.  Initially, we will only have one such repository, say,
  guix/guix-fm.git or guix/formal-methods.git, with its purpose being
  mainly to keep the sources for the site.

  For these repos we’ll happily accept patches from folks who aren’t
  Guix contributors via mailing list.  And I’d imagine once they have
  contributed enough patches, we could work out getting them commit
  access, especially if their gathered knowledge/experience extends to
  Guix directly (e.g. in form of familiarity with package definitions
  and writing them).

- Larger projects or ones that don’t quite fit the scope of Guix: for
  these, we might indeed consider registering separate Savannah projects
  rather than putting them under the Guix project.  I think the proposed
  bootstrapping ML compiler could be an example of such project.

All that said, I do wish Savannah supported finer access control at the
project level.  I just asked a fellow Savannah hacker for his opinion on
whether implementing that would be possible and feasible with the
current underlying infrastructure in mind.

>
> As for the domain name: I think it would be fine to use
> formal-methods.guix.gnu.org as long as the web site follows GNU and Guix
> policy, which mostly means referring only to free software, avoiding the
> phrase “open source” to describe it, and probably avoiding institution
> logos and such (I don’t think there’s any written policy but I would
> personally find it out of place on gnu.org.)  Anyway, the two of you are
> webmasters so you probably know this better than I do.  IOW, if you want
> to flatter your employers and labs, you might want to opt for a separate
> web site.  :-)
>

Most certainly; I wouldn’t expect anything less. :-)

As for institution logos, agreed.  If it ever comes such time that we
absolutely “have to” consider that, I’ll be sure to check with you and
the other Guix maintainers, fellow GNU webmasters, and of course rms.

As for the domain name, I think formal-methods.guix.gnu.org is a bit of
a mouthful to type or say on a regular basis, and I think an abbreviated
fm.guix.gnu.org would be more convenient; à la ci.guix.gnu.org.  For
what it’s worth, I’ve seen the FM abbreviation for Formal Methods used
fairly commonly around the community.

Lastly, I think it would be nice to have a guix-fm@gnu.org address for
Guix-FM.  Rather than a full-fledged Mailman list, I think a simple
alias, like with guix-hpc@gnu.org, will suffice.  Thoughts?

>
> Maintainers, what do you think?
>
> Anyway, step #1 is to get a web page ready.  :-)
>
> Ludo’.

I’ll work on putting one together over the next couple of days. :-)

Best,
amin

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