Re: Guix infrastructure

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi ng0,

> - master is not stable and it is not being treated as a high priority
>   problem

I don’t know where you get this from and I don’t appreciate the
insinuation that we don’t care.  The vast majority of commits to
“master” are totally fine.

As we don’t have the resources for maintaining a stable branch, “master”
is a best effort.

> - a bug in the compiler which is used in the core of Guix is bad.

We all agree here.  I don’t see the point of reiterating it.  The people
who can fix it are already working on it — in their own time and in
*addition* to all the things they regularly do.

Here’s a shout out to Ludo who tirelessly fixes old and new bugs,
implements new features, improves performance, deals with GSoC, and
answers community questions; to Andy Wingo who continuously improves
Guile performance, implements new Guix services, drafted and implemented
the potluck faster than I could blink, …; to Leo and Mark and Marius who
keep on top of security issues despite the fact that this is no fun; —
the list goes on and on.

Andy and Ludo are working on the Guile bug already.  I don’t see how
this can reasonably result in complaints.

>   In my
>   understanding that we could at least try to evade this by reducing the
>   module sizes is met with arguments like "this will be fixed in the
>   future, for now we can only split 1 module the rest has to stay
>   together for semantic and linguistic reasons".
>   If my understanding of the whole situation is wrong this is due to the
>   intransparent dealing with this serious problem and the way my idea
>   to temporarily fix it was met.

“Intransparent”?  I don’t know what else to say here.

Breaking up modules is *not* a fix, not even a temporary fix.  How would
this help when Guile never frees memory and the cumulative usage ends up
being the same?  This is something that needs to be fixed in Guile and
both Andy and Ludo have already spent time to investigate this and come
up with solutions.

I also wrote that splitting up (gnu packages python) is fine – yet I
have not seen a patch that would do this.  There’s only so much a single
person can do.

I’m skipping the rest of the complaints in this paragraph, because they
add nothing new and ignore the late night efforts of people in the Guix
and Guile communities.

> - Writing system services in Shepherd is hard.

I beg to differ.  If you have legitimate concerns please point out the
sections in the manuals that are unclear and propose changes.

> These are the major issues Guix could fix.

“Guix” is people.

Personally, I don’t want to spend more time on this discussion, because
I want to get back to getting things done that probably only few people
will see or notice, but which need to be done anyway.

--
Ricardo

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