Re: Guix Home upstreaming plan

[Xinglu Chen]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 30 2021, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> 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!

There is also a development mailing list[1] if you want to get a better
idea of what’s currently cooking. :)

> Since this kind of tool is rather unusual (there’s no real equivalent
> I’m aware of in other distros)

Nix Home Manager[2] is very similar to Guix Home, it allows for the same
kind of declarative configuration as Guix Home, but using Nix.  I have
been using and hacking on Guix Home on NixOS and it’s getting closer to
replacing Nix Home Manager for me. :)

> 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.)

Plus user packages and state management, e.g. automatically cloning Git
repositories the user has declared in their config.scm, or periodically
rsync’ing some files with a remote host.

> If people agree, I think we could aim for merging it in the next Guix
> release, which would leave us a few months.

To clarify, do you mean v1.3.0 or v1.4.0 (or whatever it’s going to be
called)?  IIUC v1.3.0 is going to be released in a few weeks (rc1 was
just announced), that might not be enough time for merging Guix Home as
the API for some of the core services are still subject to change.  WDYT
Andrew?

[1]: https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel
[2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager