Re: Insights for future development from the Guix Survey

[45mg]

Hi Steve!

First of all, thank you for all your hard work over these past months.

I guess this is as good a place as any for a general discussion thread.

For starters, I noticed that lack of support for LUKS + unencrypted
/boot was brought up multiple times. I wanted to note that there is
already an open patch series for this: [1], and it hasn't recieved
review in 4 months. I'm not sure where exactly it stands in the context
of the pending bootloader rewrite [2] (which, again, seems to have
stalled for lack of review/testing), but it might be worth looking into.

Then there's the frequent 'poor error messages' complaint. While I can
think of some significant improvements that could be made on the Guix
side (fix `guix repl` [3], maybe get `guix {home,system}` to print
errors in loaded modules [4]), I think the limiting factor here is
always going to be Guile itself: see [5], [6], etc.

Looking forward to further discussion of the survey results! We're all
awaiting part 3, but there's enough to talk about already :)


[1] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68524
[2] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/72457
[3] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68895
[4] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/75822
[5] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2020-03/msg00051.html
[6] https://lists.gnu.org/r/guix-devel/2022-11/msg00283.html