Re: Please put the system-configuration into the image

[Julien Lepiller]

Le 8 septembre 2017 12:11:45 GMT+02:00, Hartmut Goebel <address@hidden> a écrit :

Am 07.09.2017 um 14:43 schrieb ng0:
 You can take any system configuration file and build a shared or free-standing
 vm with the "guix system" function. It

I'm afraid, you did not get the point (No offence meant!): I know that I
can do this. I also know that I can maintain configs via git. But all
this is the developers perspective.

If somebody is downloading the ISO-image and installing GuixSD on some
machine – stand-alone, no other GuixSD systems around: He/she would
store the system-config somewhere on the machine, change it and
"reconfigure" and hack around. (At least this is what I would do.) So
why there is no starting-point for system-config in the image? Why would
the user need to download it from some (no quite obvious) internet-address?

I also would expect to have the config for this very system at hand.
Yes, the manual has a section "Building the Installation Image", but
*if* I ever recognize this section, I'd still have to dig into the
source and fetch the actual file.

For making live easier for new users and for encouraging them to re-gain
the power over their computer, we should IMHO serve the config on 
silver plate.

I hope my motivation is more clear now.

I also agree with Hartmut. In the installation image, we have /etc/configuration which contains some sample configuration you can start from to define your system. There is no need to have the configuration of the live system I think, because it is not what you want to install on your disk.

The qemu image however is meant to be copied directly to the virtual disk of a VM, so it is not a live system, but your own system. I think it would be better for the user to be able to access the configuration directly from the VM and start from a known-good config before reconfiguring. I now have a running GuixSD VM and it was a pain to configure, because the interface to the VM did not allow copy-pasting and had a strange plugin for interpreting my keystrokes. Had I have this file on the VM, I could have modified only a small portion of it and continue with ssh. But I had to copy the sample config character by character and hope I did not do any mistake.

If no one beats me to this, I'll try to make a patch for it this week-end.