Re: GuixSD on arm

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Jookia <address@hidden> writes:

> - Patches would get lost regularly.

Yeah, this is still a problem for me.  Many patches slip by because I
have no capacity to review them in time.  I have settled on reviewing
things that I feel I’m a little more qualified to review than others,
such as R packages, scientific software, audio software.  But it’s
really tough to review things *well* and in time.

In my opinion, patchwork hasn’t improved this, unfortunately, because
patch management requires too much effort (patches aren’t reliably
marked as merged, no email control, etc).

> I'm not cut out to what feels like nagging people when I don't know the 
> reasons
> why they haven't replied. Perhaps this is how things work in other systems, 
> but
> as someone that suffers from social anxiety and finds it hard enough to even
> send patches I can't deal with this, and Guix seems to be doing fine without 
> me.

I’m sad to hear that this makes it hard for you to continue to
contribute to Guix.

In my case a lack of a response is usually just a result of having too
many other things to work on.  Sometimes it’s because I really don’t
feel qualified to answer (as in the case of LUKS+Libreboot because at
that time I didn’t have any experience with Libreboot).

> As patches were lost and most discussion was done on the mail list, there was
> basically no discussion on patches or design problems. After getting Guix to
> boot on my Libreboot machine I went to work on fixing issues with the boot
> system, such as adding support for legacy Libreboot systems and encrypted
> bootloaders. This was lost.
>
> I also did some work to get LVM+LUKS working on Guix and tried to spark a
> discussion in to fixing the design issues in system configuration. I think 
> there
> was about one reply, and it was lost.

Now that my laptop is running Libreboot I’m actually looking at the
discussions you started to see how we can move forward there.  Thank you
for your experimentation and documenting your work on the mailing list!
I can assure you that it’s not lost (just not used in the moment).

> This experience has put me off of Guix, GNU and free software development. I
> don't blame any one, but more a system that doesn't incorporate people like 
> me.

That’s sad and I hope you will be able to reconsider some time in the
future as the project matures.

~~ Ricardo