Re: Request for assistance maintaining LibreWolf

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> We should try to come up with a solution that alleviates the burden on
> the maintainers. Given how often this issue arises, what if we try, as
> a collective, to suggest new mechanisms that would improve the
> situation?


IMO one thing that would help is to somehow losen the current very tight coupling (the guix monorepo).

a high level of centralization always translates to a bottleneck, and guix has reached a point where its centralized structure is seriously hindering it and frustrating away contributors.

i.e. it's much less risk to delegate the management of a hypothethical python channel to someone trusted than to give commit access to every contributor who wants to help maintaining the python related packages.

so, i think a lot of packages should be in channels. probably everything that is not essential for a minimally functional system that can bootstrap itself. part of python could be in the main guix repo, but whatever is not tightly needed could go into a channel with its own access control management.

some channels would have loser standards (god forbid some wouldn't frustrate the contributors with the ChangeLog format in the commit messages), and the users could decide whom they trust with what. and the guix maintainers could decide which channels to list on the official web page, with what comments/warnings.

but this is easier said than done, because formally expressing the dependencies between these channels is not a trivial task (think of e.g. keeping `guix time-machine` working in an environment where a patch in the official guix repo can break a package in some random channel, which is then fixed there in a new commit, etc). and even if doable, it would probably introduce extra code complexity.

but i'm sure there were countless discussions about the pros and cons of the monorepo, and i wish such a topic was captured in a wiki where the main arguments, obstacles, and ideas were collected for people like me who are late to the party.

but then guix doesn't really have an official wiki either. (and no, an afterthought in the libreplanet wiki doesn't count. and if you have an urge to argue, then just look at its current contents...) so we're pretty much stuck with the flat mailing list archive and IRC logs.

hrm, a tangential: maybe digesting the guix mailing list and IRC archive will be my first actual use-case for an LLM... modern problems require modern solutions.

--
• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
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