Re: Guix Home upstreaming plan

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:

> There is a goal[0] to make Guix Home[1] a part of GNU Guix.  It will reduce
> the duplications between projects, increase integrity and will provide
> Guix users with a missing tool for declarative configuration of home
> environments improving out of the box experience and allowing Guix users
> on foreign distros to have Guix System-like experience.

So, I have yet to go ahead and use it for myself to get a better feel.
In the meantime, I looked at
<https://guix-home.trop.in/Home-Configuration.html>, and I like what I
see!  It’s great that you already have clear documentation and that
everything looks consistent with the rest of Guix.

Since this kind of tool is rather unusual (there’s no real equivalent
I’m aware of in other distros), I think the manual will have to
carefully explain what problems this solves and explain why someone
would want to use it.  For example, I think the term “home environment”
should be defined upfront (I’d summarize it as user configuration files
+ user services, from my reading.)

> civodul, can we create a separate guix-home branch to work against it?

I’m all for it.  We’ll have to discuss it together, in particular among
maintainers, but an option would be to give you commit access for the
purposes of developing this branch.

I would also like to know what Julien thinks; I think it’s in our
interest to see cooperation and not competition between the two
approaches you developed.  Julien, WDYT of the plan?  More specifically,
is there anything about the design that you’d like to discuss before we
go further?  Are there guix-home-manager features that could eventually
make it in Guix Home?

I find the steady progress on Guix Home and the level of polish already
achieved pretty exciting.  If people agree, I think we could aim for
merging it in the next Guix release, which would leave us a few months.

Thank you!

Ludo’.