Re: feedback as solicited by Guix manual (Section 7.1.5)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Matthew Jordan <address@hidden> skribis:

> mentions using ifconfig, correct me if I"m wrong but isn't ifconfig
> considered deprecated?

This ifconfig (part of GNU Inetutils) is maintained, so I think it’s
fine.  :-)

> It would be nice to indicate that you may need additional swap space to
> build the various packages that come with the install.  Also sufficient
> space under /tmp is needed. In my case I had to bind mount the my tmp
> partition from the install target, and turn on the swap to achieve a
> successful install. I used these commands to achieve that.
>
> $ mount --bind /mnt/tmp /tmp
> $ swapon /dev/sda3

This is really a bug: ‘cow-store’ should bind mount /mnt/tmp like you
did.  I’ll push a fix shortly.

I suppose one doesn’t need swap if /tmp is backed by a real disk, too.

Last, ideally, you’d get substitutes for every package during the
installation, and thus having /tmp in RAM wouldn’t matter much.

Anyway, thanks for reporting it!

>> Personally, I don't like putting instructions on how to use 3rd party
>> software in manuals such as ours (or the Gentoo or Arch manuals) unless
>> the information is very specific to how we use the software.
>>
>> In my opinion, if there is some deficiency with the 3rd party programs'
>> documentation, that documentation should be improved.
>>
>> Otherwise, knowledge is fragmented into a variety of places where it
>> probably won't be updated as the 3rd party software changes. Also, each
>> system's manual or wiki will invariably contain some info that is
>> specific to that system but not declared as such. And the new, external
>> documentation will probably not be reviewed by the upstream maintainers
>> for correctness, spreading bad advice across the internet.  Finally, the
>> upstream manual will *still* not be improved.

I concur.

We can easily include hyperlinks to the relevant portions of GNU manuals
like Parted’s.  Maybe someone should contribute improvements to Parted’s
manual, such as introductory material about partitioning?

> While these are valid points, and I have to say I agree with them. Even
> Gentoo and Arch (which are among some of the more challenging distros),
> do provide some example/recipe to assist with partitioning.  I'm not
> saying we quote someone's manual, but someone might find it useful.

I also agree that providing examples of commands to type and so on is
very useful, and we’ve been adding more of that lately.

> We could always indicate that one should refer to upstream manual for
> the latest info, and still provide some steps based on a partitioning
> plan. I think this would be very helpful to those who may not be fully
> verse in partitioning.  My first time using Gentoo was pretty decent
> because of the documentation provided. Here is the appropriate snippet
> from my notes;
>
> Paritioning plan
> Assumming disk is 20GiB
> Bootloader 2MiB
> /boot 300MiB ext2/4
> Swap 1GiB
> / (rest of disk space) ext4
>
> $ lsblk
> Start parted shell
> $ parted -a optimal /dev/sda
> (parted) unit MiB
> (parted) mklabel gpt
> (parted) mkpart primary 1MiB 3MiB
> (parted) name 1 grub
> (parted) set 1 bios_grub on
> (parted) print
> (parted) mkpart primary 3MiB 303MiB
> (parted) name 2 boot
> (parted) print

I’ve come to think that ‘cfdisk’ is easier than Parted’s CLI.  WDYT?

Rather than listing this relatively long list of Parted commands,
perhaps we should provide a tool akin to what Debian’s installer has,
where it offers “standard” partitioning profiles that people can use.
This could be implemented using the Guile bindings of GNU fdisk or
something like that.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.