Re: common software

[myglc2]

Hi Ricardo,

On 01/29/2018 at 20:14 Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> Hi George,
>
>> But Ludo’ what is convenient for you is not convenient for the Guix
>> noob: They are most likely already using a mainstream GNU/Linux distro
>> on a notebook or desktop. When they try any other distro they expect it
>> to provide similar stuff to what their distro provided out of the box.
>> By not doing this we a) fail to meet expectations and b) force them into
>> the Guix config-o-rama, which, if we are honest, is not friendly: it's
>> in scheme, far from obvious, and produces errors that helpful only to
>> someone who already understands Guix.
>
> Re errors: recently this has greatly been improved.  I’m now told that
> I probably forgot to include a certain module, and how I can fix it.
> Granted, simple syntax errors aren’t reported nicely, but that’s a
> problem in Guile (and there’s a bug report for it).
>
Yes it has been improved.

> But that’s beside the point: users who install software they need into
> their user profile do not do this in the operating system configuration!
> So they don’t have to touch it at all to get things like “file” or
> “wget”.
>
Good point. But if they want wget to appear at startup in a user
account, adding it to system config is the only way to go, right?

> I also think you’re greatly exaggerating the “unfriendliness” of Guix
> configuration.
>
OK, I reread it. I apologize for "config-o-rama". SORRY ;-( Otherwise I
think I was being pretty objective.

>> This is why we should change the templates so that GuixSD comes OOTB
>> with the same stuff as any mainstream distro. IOW, we should quickly get
>> the noob running GuixSD and only then show them how cool guix-profile
>> is.
>
> Guix is all about user freedom.  Providing a bigger set of defaults
> isn’t really helping, because then we’re then telling other people to
> remove the packages from their configs if they don’t like them.  I much
> prefer a constructive approach where you *add* what you want rather than
> remove what you find was installed without your knowledge.
>
> We already have configuration templates for different systems:
> bare-bones, lightweight-desktop, and desktop.  We could add more:
> audio-workstation (for common recording tools, preconfigured JACK, and
> some extra kernel settings), graphics-workstation (blender, gimp,
> imagemagick, etc), … But I’d leave that up to whoever feels like
> maintaining and testing these templates.

Yes, global packages are against the Guix mantra ;-) But it is easier
for a noob to remove them than add them. So, IMO we should err on the
side of putting more in the template with comments saying, effectively,
"these are training wheels to be removed once you learn to ride Guix."