Re: "System Package" vs "System Service"

[Raghav Gururajan]

Thank you very much for your clear explanation. I did add Tor Service with Default Configuration to my system config; ans also added the user to Tor group. But it seems that the traffic is not routed when I checked with "check.torproject.org". What should I do?

On Sun, 2019-04-28 at 18:41 +0200, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:

Error verifying signature: Failed to execute gpg.

Hi,

On Sun, 28 Apr 2019 11:59:59 -0400

Raghav Gururajan <address@hidden> wrote:

I have this confusion/doubt. What is the difference between declaring

something as "System Package" vs "System Service" in the Guix System

Configuration?

A package is a thing that is present in your system and just stays put,

similar to a chair or any other passive object.  If you want, you can

move the chair yourself or whatever, but it won't do things for you

except incidentially.

A service is an active process that, if you ask it to, will do work for you

in order to reach a long-term goal.  The level of detail you have to specify

when requesting the service is usually very low compared to what work will

actually be carried out.

For example a hairdressing service provides you the service of cutting

your hair to a fashionable style.

A chair and a hairdressing service are fundamentally different.

Tor usually provides a proxy service (at port 9050) which will proxy all

your network traffic through it, with the goal of improving your privacy.

It's difficult to see what you need the tor package to be installed for--

because the service will already provide the proxying.  If you want

tor admin tools, you can of course install those (probably as user

packages).

For reference, I have ten system packages in addition to %base-packages

(there are 40 in the latter currently) and I'm a heavy guix user.

If anything, I expect both counts to decrease over time.