Re: Medium-term road map

[raingloom]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:37:44 +0200
Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello Guix!
> 
> We released 1.1.0, but what’s coming next?  What would you like to
> see?
> 
> There are many exciting things being developed and great ideas
> floating around.  For myself, I feel like focusing on “consolidating”
> what we have in the coming weeks.  Here are the areas I hope to focus
> on (and embarking as many of you as possible :-)):
> 
>   1. Authentication.  I want to finally provide a standardized
> mechanism to allow channels to be authenticated upon ‘guix pull’.
> “make authenticate” was a first milestone, let’s get it done.  See
>      <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22883>.
> 
>   2. Performance.  There are many things we can improve there, first
> and foremost: the “Computing derivation” part of ‘guix pull’, Guile’s
>      compiler terrible time and space requirements, further optimizing
>      core operations like ‘package-derivation’, as well as low-level
>      stuff as described at <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/40626>.
> 
>      Related to that is the question of substitute availability,
> another major hindrance to usability.  We should address this both in
> the build farm (reducing the
>      time-to-push-to-time-of-substitute-availability, tracking random
>      build failures), and on the client side (can we provide ways for
>      users to pull to a commit that won’t require them to build
>      everything from source, while not compromising on their
> security?).
> 
>   3. G-exps.  We should really finish the migration to gexps, as in
> the ‘wip-build-system-gexp’ branch, and adjust our APIs accordingly.
> 
>   4. User interface.  Let’s get our act together with ‘guix shell’ and
>      ‘guix run-script’, and let’s address other annoyances that
>      newcomers keep stumbling upon!
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Happy hacking!  :-)
> 
> Ludo’.
> 

I would love to see better tools for debugging boot time issues and a
way to not have to rewrite the entire target directory during a
repeated `guix system init` that only changes a few things. I don't
want to waste my SSD's write cycles. And it's also pointlessly slow.

Right now the debugging experience in the Guile rescue shell is...
ugh. Not great. GRUB 0.9 has a CLI that's easier to navigate.
What I'd like to see:
 - tab autocomplete
 - recovery from errors
The latter is quite hard, because certain steps don't work well when
run multiple times. For example, if you want to re-run the procedure
that mounts essential file systems, it will complain that /dev is
already mounted, instead of just realizing that it can skip mounting it.

Something equivalent to `arch-chroot` would also be nice, again for
debugging. I'm sure there is some way to make modifications to a store
on a different device, but it's not easy to find.

I've written something simple that adresses the overwriting issue, but
since it's a modification to Guix itself, it triggered a full rebuild
of the world, and I did not have the patience to sit through that, so I
just installed a more minimal system instead.