Medium-term road map

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello Guix!

We released 1.1.0, but what’s coming next?  What would you like to see?

There are many exciting things being developed and great ideas floating
around.  For myself, I feel like focusing on “consolidating” what we
have in the coming weeks.  Here are the areas I hope to focus on (and
embarking as many of you as possible :-)):

  1. Authentication.  I want to finally provide a standardized mechanism
     to allow channels to be authenticated upon ‘guix pull’.  “make
     authenticate” was a first milestone, let’s get it done.  See
     <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22883>.

  2. Performance.  There are many things we can improve there, first and
     foremost: the “Computing derivation” part of ‘guix pull’, Guile’s
     compiler terrible time and space requirements, further optimizing
     core operations like ‘package-derivation’, as well as low-level
     stuff as described at <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/40626>.

     Related to that is the question of substitute availability, another
     major hindrance to usability.  We should address this both in the
     build farm (reducing the
     time-to-push-to-time-of-substitute-availability, tracking random
     build failures), and on the client side (can we provide ways for
     users to pull to a commit that won’t require them to build
     everything from source, while not compromising on their security?).

  3. G-exps.  We should really finish the migration to gexps, as in the
     ‘wip-build-system-gexp’ branch, and adjust our APIs accordingly.

  4. User interface.  Let’s get our act together with ‘guix shell’ and
     ‘guix run-script’, and let’s address other annoyances that
     newcomers keep stumbling upon!

Thoughts?

Happy hacking!  :-)

Ludo’.