Re: Guix Documentation Meetup

[calcium]

I would like for Guix to host a community wiki (in addition to a more 
discoverable official documentation).


That’s the purpose of the Cookbook, which is open to all contributors.



It is not a wiki. You can't edit and review easly, but must instead send a 
contribution to someone (IRC or email) which is teadious and discourage small 
and quick contributions.

And my point was about allowing a low effort wiki that may contain wrong or 
incomplete content (but quick to contribute/use and where there is no 
expectation of high quality).

And this seems to go against the current spirit of hte Guix Cookbook (High 
quality/Without mistakes examples/content about howto do a specific task)

Re: Guix Documentation Meetup

[calcium]

I strongly agree with matt about the importance of discoverability that is 
currently lacking (`geiser-doc-symbol-at-point isn't enough).
Its pretty hard to find out how to do something beyond the basic usage.

I would like for Guix to host a community wiki (in addition to a more 
discoverable official documentation).

Because a collaborative wiki that encourages effortless and low quality content 
could alleviate the problem of discoverability and context.

This could serve as a stepping stone for users to understand the context (by 
reading what another user tried and failed to achieve) and to find possible 
solutions (avoiding the time sunk of dead-ends and maybe adapting an ugly hack 
into a cleaner solution, or even just using the ugly hack, instead of gving up 
on the use of Guix).

The low quality wiki could also motivate people to correct misconceptions and submit 
better approaches ("Someone is WRONG on the internet" https://xkcd.com/386/ ).

Re: EXWM

[calcium]

I was totally at lost when I started my emacs/exwm session and tried to 
`find-file' only to be redirected to an 'ido-find-file` with whom I don't know 
how to navigate.

In the moment, it felt very intrusive for me and I was very afraid to be unable 
to control my emacs because I have set all my emacs's keybindings to 
non-standard keys ((in a modal way (à la vim) but using my own custom modals) 
and without honoring the `C-c' convetion.) and I don't know how to navigate 
emacs using the default key bindings.

Luckly, this time (because packages can evolve to add more default key 
bindings), it was just the annoyance of ido that affected me.


I was thankfully able to understand what was going on by finding the Guix-devel 
archive discussing this issue.

I think that if we choose to keep things as they are, a simple fix that would 
help next users know what is going on without having to find an archived 
mailing list :

a ) being more explicit in messages in both cases like :
   (message "no \"~/.exwm\" elisp configuration found to setup exwm. "
"Falling back to executing the default config using 
`(exwm-config-default)'")
   (message "executing the elisp found at \"~/.exwm\"")
b ) while still keeping the explicit messages, creating the ~/.exwm file when 
it doesn't exist populated with guix's choice of default settings (so that the 
user can read and tweak his config)

Because the message thrown by the snippet bellow is not enough at all.
 
--8<---cut here---start->8---

(cond ((file-exists-p "~/.exwm") (load-file "~/.exwm"))
  ((not (featurep (quote exwm)))
   (require (quote exwm))
   (require (quote exwm-config))
   (exwm-config-default)
   (message (concat "exwm configuration not found. "
"Falling back to default configuration..."
--8<---cut here---end--->8---