Re: Insights for future development from the Guix Survey

[Steve George]

Hi 45mg,

Thanks for adding your thoughts!

On 25/01/2025 08:23, 45mg wrote:
> Hi Steve!
>
> First of all, thank you for all your hard work over these past months.
>
> I guess this is as good a place as any for a general discussion thread.
>
> For starters, I noticed that lack of support for LUKS + unencrypted
> /boot was brought up multiple times. I wanted to note that there is
> already an open patch series for this: [1], and it hasn't recieved
> review in 4 months. I'm not sure where exactly it stands in the context
> of the pending bootloader rewrite [2] (which, again, seems to have
> stalled for lack of review/testing), but it might be worth looking into.
(...)

In general, the current work-flow and ethos within the team seems to 
favour incremental changes. Perhaps it's due to being volunteer-driven 
but I've seen multiple big patch-sets get to about 90% and then never 
make it over the line.

The number one reason for this, is the problem of a constrained 
contribution review process. I guess 'big' series will be deprioritised 
if it's not the reviewers specialist area.

Big changes need a group to work together, we have 'teams' (bit nascent) 
- but maybe we need some other way to highlight big changes and rally 
people together?

> Then there's the frequent 'poor error messages' complaint. While I can
> think of some significant improvements that could be made on the Guix
> side (fix `guix repl` [3], maybe get `guix {home,system}` to print
> errors in loaded modules [4]), I think the limiting factor here is
> always going to be Guile itself: see [5], [6], etc.
(...)

Issues around the development experience being slow and that error 
messages and debugging are difficult come up high on contributor's concerns.

Guile is a small community, where possible we should leverage other 
communities tools/approach imho. I think Arei-rs [0] is a great example 
of that - as it's editor independent and is proven in the Clojure 
community - maybe there are other opportunities. Anything where a small 
group gets distracted into writing it's own tooling from first 
principles seems bad - probably fun, but not productive.


> Looking forward to further discussion of the survey results! We're all
> awaiting part 3, but there's enough to talk about already :)
>
>
> [1] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68524
> [2] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/72457
> [3] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68895
> [4] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/75822
> [5] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2020-03/msg00051.html
> [6] https://lists.gnu.org/r/guix-devel/2022-11/msg00283.html

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/emacs-arei