Re: Proposal: Differentiate products more clearly (Cycle 01)

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Thu, 12 Oct 2023 at 14:28, Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> wrote:

> In my presentations I try to drive home the point that Guix is a
> solution for reproducible deployment at every level of scale.  I have a
> set of slides similar to the “Reproducible Outputs” section in your
> home-page.pdf, going from package to environments to containers to
> systems to sites (via “guix deploy”).

Thinking aloud.

For what it is worth, I also present Guix using levels, and depending on
the audience I focus on one or the other.  Somehow, I draw this picture:

  package manager                                       guix package
    transactional and declarative                       rollback, manifest.scm
      eases development experience                      guix shell
        produces shareable packs                        guix pack
          produces isolated virtual machines            guix system
            used to build a whole GNU/linux distribution
              and also a Scheme library                 guix repl

And the end of the presentation, I often conclude that Guix is
a computational environment manager on steroids.

Most of the time, we need an entry point to embark people on the
journey.  The linear layers is inaccurate but ease in talk mode – since
a talk is story where all the dots must be connected.  The entry point
is what speaks to a broad audience for being hooked in.

For instance, the website Emacs opens the webpage with: « An extensible,
customizable, free/libre text editor — and more. » The entry point is
“text editor” and then you embark for a journey… and it can end to be
your Window Manager. ;-) The entry point “A Lisp platform for text
manipulation” is probably more accurate but it would not speak to most.

The question is which entry point for Guix if not “package manager”? :-)

I do not know what is the best entry point for describing Guix.  Adapted
from Nix webpage: declarative builds and reproducible deployments.

  GNU Guix is a reproducible deployment manager for GNU/Linux systems.
  It is designed to give users more control over their general purpose
  and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to
  redeploy in one or many devices, and over time.

Cheers,
simon