Re: Feedback from JRES in Dijon

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Julien,

Julien Lepiller <address@hidden> skribis:

> I presented the project at JRES yesterday and had lots of questions
> and reactions.

Thanks for the nice talk and for sharing feedback!  It’s really great to
see how each one of us approaches it from a different angle, and I think
you chose the right one for this audience (mostly sysadmins).

(The install/remove example on the first slide is of course
questionable, but the rest is great.  ;-))

> One person was wondering whether Guix would be a good idea for there
> cluster. I said yes then I redirected them to guix hpc.

Neat, I hope we’ll hear from them.  :-)

> Another wanted to have some kind of doi for guix describe + manifest
> (a better UI and easier thing to cite in a paper I suppose).

I guess a single Git commit ID or, better, a Software Heritage intrinsic
ID could fit the bill.

> Another was asking about the possibility ofusing Guix to have multiple
> kernels and boot a debian with guix's kernel (so as to choose a
> compatible kernel at boot iiuc).

Uh, an unusual use case.

> The person I talked to at lunch was a bit skeptical about Guix. They
> have it and Nix, with module on their cluster. They told me they were
> more concerned about replicability than reproducibility. Also, their
> users are lost between the options, they have trouble getting help on
> guix from their admins and they end up using conda, yet another tool
> ^^".

Ah well, there’s a learning curve.  Now, my hope is that people who
manage to do “conda install” would also manage to get started with “guix
install”.  But that’s more and more of a social issue (spreading the
word) than a technical one, I think.

Anyway, nice work!  If you want we can have the PDF of your talk (and
the article you wrote at
<https://conf-ng.jres.org/2019/document_revision_5343.html?download>!)
on the web site, perhaps with a tiny blog post giving some context.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

PS: I also got positive feedback from a colleague who attended your
    talk.  :-)