Berlin Guix gathering: notes!

Berlin Guix gathering: notes!

[Ricardo Wurmus]

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Hi Guix!

Yesterday a couple of Guix hackers got together in Berlin to discuss a
wide range of Guix-related topics.  Attached are the notes I took during
the meeting.  If anything is unclear about these notes please just ask
(while the meeting is still fresh in our minds).

Hope you’ll find this interesting!


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* GuixSD installer using ncurses (jmd)
- would run on the console, will work on small screens in 80x25
- add menu for common use-cases (e.g. webserver, GNOME desktop, Xfce desktop…)
- ACTION: incorporate in guix proper (‘guix system’ subcommand) in a branch
- don’t shell out to “guix system init …” — use Guix as a library instead
- TODO: fsck may not be necessary (because it won’t work on mounted disks)
- add menu for service configuration (maybe not as part of the installer)

* package importers (rekado)
- use =--archive= to determine archive *preference* only; this is important for recursive importers that may have to download package info from different upstream sources (e.g. CRAN vs Bioconductor)
- parse Makefile to detect inputs (e.g. “-lz” for “zlib”, detect requirement of fortran compiler)
- build up package objects directly without going through text intermediates; rewrite importers to just serialise imported package objects
- maybe creating package expressions doesn’t scale; allow building packages without having package expressions at all (e.g. install from URL)
- run “guix refresh” automatically?  Try building updates automatically on a branch, then manually cherry-pick into master
- let “guix refresh” create patches/commits?
- run importer on update to check validity of existing fields (e.g. inputs and licenses)

* the new build farm (ludo)
- unsure how to replace IMPI features
- idea: remote control server over serial port with another server
- cuirass not quite working yet, discussing with Matthieu
- maybe use funds to expand disk space to avoid GC (and related mistakes)

* Guix in HPC (ludo)
- write documentation for sysadmins how to deploy Guix on HPC (roel and rekado)
- create/update RPM and Deb packages (roel)
- outreach: write blog posts, mention Guix in “official” institute publications, joint press release for HPC project
- advertise Guix in HPC; start website with example HPC deployments, list of contacts for consulting, etc (roel)
- package grid engine userspace tools

* live system based on GuixSD (ng0)
“long term and short term roadmap of a live-system based on and integrated into GuixSD”
- secushare needs live system for users to use secushare+gnunet+guix
- ready to use psyced, gnunet, securedelete, tlsdate, etc
- idea: somewhat like Tails (run from USB drive) but based on GuixSD
- goal: present live system at GHM 2017
- still need packaging, service tests and documentation, reproducibility checks, etc

* package distribution via gnunet-fs (ng0)
- ask for release of functional parts of GNUnet
- suggest use of ci.inria.fr (Jenkins) for continuous integration of GNUnet
- combine the functional parts of GNUnet with Remy’s GSoC project to prevent bitrot

* most pressing UI/UX issues (ludo)
- grafting tells you too late what it’s going to do
- reduce conflicts when building profile generations;
detect possible conflicts early (e.g. due to propagation); bail out if a propagated package conflicts with an installed package
- modularise texlive (rekado)
- add a verbose mode to ask guix to tell why it builds or downloads something
- show time to finish downloads (depends on nginx headers; maybe just guess?)
- hide build output by default, print progress bar instead (maybe based on build time in old build logs)
- can we have official ISOs?
- show propagated packages in the output of “guix package -I” upon request
- maybe write bindings for [[http://augeas.net/][Augeas]] to modify (or create?) configuration files without having to express them (and support their quirks) in Guix DSLs; or reuse their configuration file schemas to generate config file DSLs (rekado will check this out)

* organizational issues (ludo)
- more releases, more often!  Releasing is hard, let’s try to automate more or offload work from personal laptop to new build machine
- rekado makes next release!
- increase bus factor of new build farm (needs more admins and more to test the shared operating system configuration in VMs)
- nagios monitoring of build hosts (rekado might help)
- DONE move the “beta software” banner to the downloads section above GuixSD

* workflow language (roel)

* guix pull (ludo)
- not discussed

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-- 
Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
http://elephly.net

Re: Berlin Guix gathering: notes!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> Hi Guix!
>
> Yesterday a couple of Guix hackers got together in Berlin to discuss a
> wide range of Guix-related topics.  Attached are the notes I took during
> the meeting.  If anything is unclear about these notes please just ask
> (while the meeting is still fresh in our minds).
>
> Hope you’ll find this interesting!

I found it very interesting!  Thanks for taking the notes.
Looking forward to the presumably-next gathering of Guix people at
FOSDEM :)