Re: Google Summer of Code project concepts

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Chris Dale <adventureonthehighseas@gmail.com> skribis:

> I'm definitely interested in getting the distro bootable in general. What
> are the remaining roadblocks for this issue? What remaining tools need to
> be added? And the question for me: are there good, purely-functional
> implementations of these tools we can look at?

The goal would be provide mechanisms to describe the system’s global
configuration, and the instantiate it, similar to what NixOS does.  So
users would describe the set of services do be started, and the usual
bits of configuration such as user accounts, timezone, locale, and
networking settings.

This is mostly missing.  I did a “boot-to-Guile” QEMU image some time
ago that was built entirely using Guix.  That could serve as a starting
point.

Then I would like to use dmd as the init system:

  https://gitorious.org/guix/dmd

The project needs love, testing, and everything, so that’s another area
where you could help.

>> It sounds like the proposed project has more to do with Guile than Guix.
>> But I haven't heard the details yet.  Please elaborate.
>>
>
> The project would be about extending the Guix distribution with more Guile
> projects - it would not, admittedly, involving much work on the actual Guix
> package manager, though I'm not against doing work on that.

I believe Guile could be a tool allowing us to provide an unprecedented
level of integration and flexibility: Guile for packages, Guile in the
initrd, Guile in the init system, why not Guile for network-related
setup tasks, and perhaps Guile in the WM.  The good thing is that each
of these aspects can be tackled mostly independently of the others.

Let your imagination work, and let us know any ideas you want to
discuss!  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.