caton...@gmail.com writes:
I asked for indications about the process (what magic to use in
the
REPL)
My experience with Guix, in general, is that the REPL isn't
particularly useful for any task beyond very simple testing (eg,
what are the contents of ‘%base-services’). It's a shame, but I
suspect it's like this because it's hard to make it more
functional, and there are more important problems to work on. Even
though I would much prefer to do almost all work with a REPL, I
have not invested the effort into figuring it out because I don't
have the time or expertise, currently. I can't fault anyone else
for making similar choices.
This should be covered in the cookbook
I agree. The cookbook could use a lot of work. Guix's
documentation suffers in the middle ranges. There's a lot of very
high level overview, and all the low level bits are reasonably
documented, but there's very little on how to integrate them.
If we were building a house, it'd be like having instructions that
say: our house is made out of rooms. Then being given a bill of
materials for all the different types of nails, boards, etc that
can be used to build a house. There's no (or almost no)
instructions for how to use those parts to build the shepherd
service room, or how to connect the activation plumbing,
etc. Unfortunately, those are the instructions that are most
important, I think.
I have been keeping notes on my process of learning Guix in the
hopes of starting something along these lines, but I'm not sure
I'll ever have the time to get around to it; and I'm not much of a
writer, besides.
In fact Tryton modules are not python modules and there's a
patch
modifying how Tryton retrieves its modules in Guix
Yet there's no service for Tryton
This is the case for many packages. The good news(?) is that you
can create your services your operating system config, and if you
can get them working acceptably, send a patch.
I think the friction on how to write a service is not in the
semantics
involved
It's more menial
See above: there's no documentation for assembly. Everything I've
learned was from studying the source.
As I'm writing this, I noticed someone replied to my toot
(here
https://tines.spork.org/objects/a2ff7376-c9a2-4bbd-9307-a5374571edb4
)
as you can see, they also noticed a difference in the experience
between creating home services and system services
I wasn't following this thread at the time, and didn't know
whether you were talking about shepherd services or not. In terms
of shepherd services, yes, there's quite a difference (maybe it
would be a good idea to define a generic service type, akin to
‘home-shepherd-service-type’ that only extends the
‘shepherd-root-service-type’ with a shepherd service?). As I said
there, if you have questions, feel free to ask! I may not be able
to write the cookbook/how-to that I want to, but I can try to
answer questions and share what little knowledge I do have with a
fellow neophyte.
However, for the types of services you'd add to the ‘services’
slot of the home/operating-system config, I don't think there is
much of a difference; or maybe none at all.
Guix is being successful, these days but that's an exception in
the
free software world and more so in the GNU world
I'm happy that Guix is growing, and more people are using it and
adding to it (I'm a recent adopter, too!). But I think it's still
a niche distribution, and it shows in things like the
documentation, the builds breaking, old or broken packages, etc.
I want to be very clear on this point, though: I don't blame
anyone for this, and I don't mean to downplay anyone's work
because of these problems. Creating and maintaining a
distribution, especially one as different as Guix, is a tremendous
amount of work, and it's frankly incredible how well Guix does on
such a small core crew. It's simply impossible to have the same
level of polish as a bigger, more established distribution, with
an order of magnitude (or more) contributors.
I have a job now (and it has to do with Odoo), I also train in a
gym, I
like to spend the free time I have on the beach (as it's evident
from
my presence on the fediverse) so I don't know it's not like I
have any
slots to assign to attempt this
We're, all of us, in a similar situation, and we're few in number
(relatively), with a lot of work to do. I think this explains the
state of Guix more than anything else.
-bjc