Re: guix system: error: service 'ssh-daemon' requires 'networking', which is undefined

[Jan Synáček]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 2:43 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> I improved the message along these lines in commit
> 2c2ec261a8d3c37e5147038f47ad24c57cde4134, let me know what you think.
>
> To be more concrete about other improvements, here’s what should be
> feasible (but needs to be discussed to see whether it’s actually
> helpful):
>
>   1. Display the location of the Shepherd service definition:
>
>        gnu/services/ssh.scm:160:4: 'ssh-daemon' requires 'networking'…
>
>      Trivial to implement, but the downside is that the user doesn’t
>      really care about this file.
>
>   2. Same, but also show some sort of a stack trace (but not an actual
>      Scheme stack trace) showing where this Shepherd service comes from:
>
>        gnu/services/ssh.scm:160:4: 'ssh-daemon' requires 'networking'…
>        gnu/services/ssh.scm:117:30: … in extension of service 'shepherd'
>        gnu/services/ssh.scm:228:2: … while folding service 'lsh’ instantiated 
> here
>
>      The problem is that, currently, we’d get the location of the
>      (service …) form, which is in the ‘lsh-service’ procedure, in
>      gnu/services/ssh.scm.
>
>      It may be hard to come up with intelligible messages, and there’s a
>      risk that showing too many lines of messages would be
>      counterproductive.
>
> Thoughts?

>From a regular user's point of view, this still misses the point,
which I originally attempted to make. I suggest an error message like
this:

'ssh-daemon' requires 'networking', try adding
'static-networking-service' or 'dhcp-client-service' to system
services

Or something like that. The point is, make it clear that "requires
networking" means adding at least one service to the operating
system's services and make at least one suggestion. Definitely a step
forward to user friendliness.

Cheers,
-- 
Jan Synáček