Re: guix home

[Andrew Tropin]

Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de> writes:

> I'll have to give your guix home command a try!  It sounds easy!

One of the goals is to make it effortless to use) For now we still
implement services for basic software and some fundamental features, but
in a couple of weeks plan to invite few more people to actively use
`guix home`. Follow the news on rde-announces mailing list [fn:1].

Thank you for kind supportive words!

Ryan Prior <ryanprior@hey.com> writes:

> Thanks for sharing this Andrew, it looks awesome & I'm going to give it
> a try!

You are very welcome!)

> What do you think about changing the command? It manages user files,
> user services, user environment variables, the lifecycle of user
> sessions. So we could have "guix system" for system-level things, and
> "guix user" for user-level things.

I don't have very strong preference here and open for discussion, but
will provide my rationale for original naming:

- `guix system` manages operating systems and its generations and stuff.
- `guix package` installs, removes, upgrades packages.

Following this convention `guix user` would have to manage users, while
`guix home` manages user's home folders and related stuff. I find home
subcommand more suitable here, however other internal naming may be
temporary and is a subject to change if better options are found.

> Similarly, many of the services you describe sound to me like they
> would be easier to understand what they do with names like
> "user-service," "user-environment-vars," etc.

It's maybe true, however, the other benefit of home- naming is it makes
all the related concepts distinct. It will be harder to confuse
home-services with systemd user service for example. Still have to work
on a better naming in some places.

> I feel Guix needs something like this upstream. Whether this is the
> right implementation or not I'm not qualified to judge, but I'll read
> the source code and see what I can learn or contribute!

All the contributions from discussions to patches are welcome!)

* Footnotes

[fn:1] https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-announce

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin