Re: [Proposal] The Formal Methods in GNU Guix Working Group

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Amin & Brett,

Amin Bandali <address@hidden> skribis:

>> It’s fine to host the repo on Savannah: we can ask for a new repo under
>> the Guix umbrella, the downside being that access control will be the
>> same as for the other repos (we can only grant access to all the repos
>> or none of them.)  If you plan to open it more to formal methods people
>> that do not yet contribute to Guix, it might be easier to use a separate
>> repo.  You tell us!
>>
>
> Right.  Thinking about this, as I see it right now I think our use cases
> for repos fall roughly into two categories:
>
> - Closely Guix-related or small standalone things: this could be things
>   like the Haunt sources for our site, or a Guix channel for additional
>   package definitions, or anything closely related to Guix and/or small
>   enough to fit under the Guix umbrella just fine.  For these, we should
>   be able to get by with a very small number of repos in the short and
>   long term.  Initially, we will only have one such repository, say,
>   guix/guix-fm.git or guix/formal-methods.git, with its purpose being
>   mainly to keep the sources for the site.
>
>   For these repos we’ll happily accept patches from folks who aren’t
>   Guix contributors via mailing list.  And I’d imagine once they have
>   contributed enough patches, we could work out getting them commit
>   access, especially if their gathered knowledge/experience extends to
>   Guix directly (e.g. in form of familiarity with package definitions
>   and writing them).

Sounds good to me.

> - Larger projects or ones that don’t quite fit the scope of Guix: for
>   these, we might indeed consider registering separate Savannah projects
>   rather than putting them under the Guix project.  I think the proposed
>   bootstrapping ML compiler could be an example of such project.

Yes.

> All that said, I do wish Savannah supported finer access control at the
> project level.  I just asked a fellow Savannah hacker for his opinion on
> whether implementing that would be possible and feasible with the
> current underlying infrastructure in mind.

I suppose it would be hard and not necessarily advisable given that
Savane is no longer actively developed, AIUI.

>> As for the domain name: I think it would be fine to use
>> formal-methods.guix.gnu.org as long as the web site follows GNU and Guix
>> policy, which mostly means referring only to free software, avoiding the
>> phrase “open source” to describe it, and probably avoiding institution
>> logos and such (I don’t think there’s any written policy but I would
>> personally find it out of place on gnu.org.)  Anyway, the two of you are
>> webmasters so you probably know this better than I do.  IOW, if you want
>> to flatter your employers and labs, you might want to opt for a separate
>> web site.  :-)
>>
>
> Most certainly; I wouldn’t expect anything less. :-)
>
> As for institution logos, agreed.  If it ever comes such time that we
> absolutely “have to” consider that, I’ll be sure to check with you and
> the other Guix maintainers, fellow GNU webmasters, and of course rms.

Sure, sounds good to me!  (Note that rms doesn’t have a say here, though.)

> As for the domain name, I think formal-methods.guix.gnu.org is a bit of
> a mouthful to type or say on a regular basis, and I think an abbreviated
> fm.guix.gnu.org would be more convenient; à la ci.guix.gnu.org.  For
> what it’s worth, I’ve seen the FM abbreviation for Formal Methods used
> fairly commonly around the community.

Alright, I like expressive phrases like ‘call-with-current-continuation’
but I’m fine with “fm” nonetheless.  ;-)

> Lastly, I think it would be nice to have a address@hidden address for
> Guix-FM.  Rather than a full-fledged Mailman list, I think a simple
> alias, like with address@hidden, will suffice.  Thoughts?

Yeah, I guess a simple alias is enough for things that don’t fit on
guix-devel (address@hidden is very low traffic, mostly for when one
needs to reach out to the usual HPC suspects.)

Let us know when you have a web page ready.  Then you’re welcome to send
a patch against maintenance.git for ‘bayfront.scm’ (DNS config and
probably web site as well.)

Thanks!

Ludo’.