Re: On the naming of System and Home services modules.

[Andrew Tropin]

On 2021-09-15 09:50, Katherine Cox-Buday wrote:

> Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 15 2021, Andrew Tropin wrote:
>
>>> Records even for the same services have slightly different fields and
>>> because of macro nature can't be reused between Home and System
>>> services. In more details I mentioned this problem here:
>>> https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel/%3C87y2cqifpx.fsf%40yoctocell.xyz%3E#%3C878s4l8kai.fsf@trop.in%3E
>>
>> Some services might be useful to have in both Guix System and Guix Home;
>> for instance, Guix System currently has a service for configuring
>> Syncthing, and I think it makes sense to also have one for Guix Home,
>> this would mean that people not using Guix System (me :-)) could also
>> have Guix manage Syncthing.  With the current approach, we would have to
>> copy and paste quite a bit of code, and if the Syncthing service for
>> Guix System changes, then the one for Guix Home might have to change as
>> well.
>
> I agree with this point. I have several Guix systems, and several
> non-guix systems with Guix managing some services. In the past, I have
> had to write my own Shepherd services for things already written as
> system services.
>

Shouldn't be a problem, if home service will be a prefered option.
More details on that in the reply to Xinglu, look for linger keyword. 

>
>>> The intersection of home and system services should be very low, so
>>> there is not much benifit here as well.
>>
>> Quite the opposite, I think it would be great if home and system
>> services could integrate more with each other.  In NixOS, the NixOS
>> modules and Home Manager modules feel like two very distinct things, and
>> it’s not really easy to share things between them.
>
> I agree.
>
>>> ** Summary
>>> Let's keep System and Home services separate for the sake of clarity,
>>> reuse code via shared modules or just exports in (gnu services ...).
>
> [...]
>
>>> However, ~(gnu home services ...)~ also looks cool, but it would be a
>>> little inconsistent with system services, which will have one level of
>>> nestiness less: ~(gnu services)~.
>>>
>>> IMO, ~(gnu home services ...)~ would be a good choice if we use ~(gnu
>>> system services)~ for system services.
>>
>> Yeah, having both (gnu system service) and (gnu home service) could make
>> sense, but since we only have (gnu services), I don’t think it makes
>> much sense.
>
> I haven't put in the energy to follow the rational behind the proposed
> naming schemas, but I'd like to suggest this as well: =(gnu services
> home)=. This namespace increases in specificity, and I think it would
> easily follow that things in =(gnu services home)= might utilize things
> in =(gnu services)=. Or I also like the idea of =home= and =system=
> being sibling namespaces.

Actually a good idea, thank you, I will consider it.

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