Re: Google Summer of Code project concepts

[Chris Dale <adventureonthehighseas@gmail.com>]

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Repairing this project seems like a really interesting way to go:
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/The-Scheme-shell-_0028scsh_0029.html

Not just configurable in Guile, but interactable in it all the time! The
link on the page appears to be out-of-date: a fairly active version of
guile-scsh lives here: http://gitorious.org/guile-scsh, though from the
contributors to that project it seems like at least some of the mailing
list is already pretty aware of it! Even if we were to consider the
command-line interaction expendable, it seems useful beyond measure to
include functionality to run shell scripts in Guile. The operating system
starts to look more like a library than an environment, and the user would
feel like they were in Guile mode as soon as they boot up. What a joy!

Of course, the goal "get Guix bootable and running primarily Guile Scheme
programs" is a pretty big goal, and fairly imprecise. I'd consider getting
the WM packaged a secondary goal to getting a Guile shell running, so a
project might be simply be "get Guix bootable and run ls through the
guile-scsh" or some such a thing. Any feedback or ideas? My biggest barrier
is not really knowing how much work needs to be done, or how much I could
expect to get done in a summer. It seems that working 40 hours a week for
three months would probably empower a body to do a fair amount.  I don't
really understand how an operating system becomes bootable, so I'd need
some guidance on what exactly needs to be done to get that happening - that
is, what exactly is the nature of the gulf between, say, boot-to-Guile, and
Guix becoming a bootable distro? I don't know where to plug it all
together, so to speak! I am certainly more than willing to learn; just
explaining that this is all new to me. As you may have guessed, it is not
my OS hacking skillz that interest me in the project, but my desire to see
functional programming get used in practical software. I'm willing to learn
just about anything to contribute to that goal :)

Broadly though, it seems like the order of business would be boot-to-Guile
+ Guix → dmd → Guile-scsh → nwm. Obviously those chunks are discrete, and
you could chop them off at any point and still be better off than you were
before. I could also see an argument for reversing the order of Guile-schsh
and nwm, but as an arch user I always think of shells before window
managers :D

My ideal project result would be a bootable distro that I can configure and
interact with in Guile Scheme. If it had a wm, that'd be the icing on the
cake (as wms always are! :P). Thoughts?

Thanks so much!

[Chris] Dale


On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Brandon Invergo <brandon@gnu.org> skribis:
>
> > Check out nwm:
> > https://github.com/nizmic/nwm
>
> Indeed, that looks like something we want to have.
>
> Ludo’.
>

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