Re: Communication and Design at Guix

[L p R n d n <guix@lprndn.info>]

Hello,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello,
>
> L  p R n  d n    <guix@lprndn.info> skribis:
>
>> After taking some time learning Guix and trying to get some new packages
>> in, I wanted get involved in a slightly different way. I'm not good at
>> programming and I think my time might be better used participating in
>> tasks a little more inline with my skills.
>> The thing is that I find "design" and "communication" (take it in a very broad
>> way) often a little more complex and delicate to tackle in a group
>> project. This is why I'm introducing the idea with this mail.
>
> This is one of the non-programming activities where Guix needs help so
> I’m glad you’re offering to contribute!
>
>> I think the Guix project could benefit a lot from dealing with the
>> "rest of the world" and how it wants to show itself. It might even help
>> clarify some technical decisions if needed. Bonus is that next release
>> will probably be 1.0 and that it means Guix will get extra attention.
>>
>> I have a few things I would like to talk about but, as I don't want to
>> force aniything on anyone, I wanted to first have your thoughts about this and
>> eventually what you guix people think would be nice to tackle on. (I
>> think I saw something about a wiki somewhere for example etc.)
>
> I’m not sure we need a wiki.  :-)

Yeah, I don't know. Still I think some things would benefit from
not getting lost in the mailing list or IRC. :-/

> A very concrete task that could be of interest to you is the “name
> change” (a bit of a strong word) that we’d like to implement by 1.0.
> I’ll try to summarize.  Currently we have “Guix” and “GuixSD”, and that
> confuses things: people visit the web site, they see a “GuixSD” logo and
> get confused because they were just looking for a package manager, not a
> whole distro, or they think “GuixSD” is a storage device ;-), things
> like that.
>
> The idea is to bring everything under the “Guix” name.  Most of the
> time, writing “Guix” is good enough—after all, one can run ‘guix system’
> on a foreign distro, too.  When we really need to make the distinction,
> for instance in the manual, we would write “Guix System” to designate
> what we currently call “GuixSD”.

Hum. It might just be as easy as getting rid of the GuixSD logo and
wording for the most part. Then we can find a *preferred* way to
designate GuixSD (a Guix system (probably), Guix distro, Guix os).Here,
it's more about making GuixSD "disappear" but we could also just rebrand
GuixSD with some kind of "subtitle": "Guix, the system", derive a logo
from the Guix's one. It depends a lot from what we want to put under the spotlight.

> This has implications mostly on the web site and on the manual.  Ricardo
> sketched web site modifications here:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-01/msg00300.html
>
> It would probably have further implications on how we present
> Guix/GuixSD.
>
> WDYT?

Yeah, thinking about GuixSD as a derivative is probably the best way to
comprehend it. So give it its own leaf page is probably a good idea. I
would keep all downloads on the same page though and just separate them
visually. But it depends froms what I said previously.

>> By the way, I wanted to start working on the documentation. 
>> IMHO, it might benefit from a little graphical enhancement for
>> newcomers. The thing is that it's currently hosted on
>> gnu.org so it's probably not possible to modify the design. So I wanted
>> to ask, first, if that's something that would be welcome? What could be
>> the possibilities? And what would be the technical limitations?
>
> The HTML pages at gnu.org/s/guix/manual are generated from Texinfo.  The
> CSS there is shared with all the GNU manuals, which is nice for
> consistency.  Ideally modifications of the CSS would be submitted to the
> GNU webmaster or bug-gnulib@gnu.org (I forgot which one).  However, be
> aware that you may encounter misplaced conservatism if you take that
> route, so don’t lose your hair on it.
>
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.