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2014-09-18.log
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<tadni>Man, even the guix name clarification is getting comments. '''"Guix" is a good project with a stupid name. "Pronounced 'geeks'"? Really?''' :^P <tadni>From a 4chan lisp general thread. <tadni>davexunit: I'm just worried from a marketing standpoint, which is huge if we want GNU Distro to be successful. Complaints seem far to common, or maybe I'm just too sensitive to them. <civodul>let's hope people go slightly beyond the project name when browsing the web page <tadni>civodul: I mean, luckily the core explanation/synopsis is a very small blurb -- so it's easy to read the whole thing without much investment. <tadni>Marketing is probably the number one skill set a majority of GNU projects don't have. GNOME has it down pretty good, but when it comes to a unified GNU distro, it worries me a bit. <tadni>I'm hopping the GNU name/brand by itself will at least give us "cred" amongst other Free Software distros though. <davexunit>I hear tell that we'll be approved as a fully free distro soon ;) <civodul>from a well-informed person, even ;-) <civodul>tadni: marketing help is needed, indeed <tadni>davexunit: What's gonna be a the free-distro insigna for GNU, just the GNU head? *tadni wishes he was better with logo design. <ijp>how about a two dead gnus crossed on a mount of dead gnus motif? <ijp>points for whomever gets the reference *civodul not sure he gets the reference <tadni>ijp: Yeah, no idea. Sounds like the ravings of a madman. *tadni might formally propose GNU Jitsu again one day. :^P <ijp>tadni: indeed, it was the duke of wellington (in blackadder III) <tadni>Probably too biased on my end though. <ijp><Duke of Wellington> Two other trifling things Highness.. The men had a whip-round and got you this. Well, what I mean is I had the men roundly whipped until they got you this. It's a cigarillo case engraved with the regimental crest of two crossed dead Frenchmen, emblazoned on a mound of dead Frenchmen motif. <ijp>alas, the closest video I could find was the lines immediate after this <tadni>ijp: Is that a threat to the two big guile maintainers? :^) <davexunit>you get the obscure reference award, that's for sure <tadni>Though one is a frenchmen trasnplant. <ijp>I did think it amusing to consider civodul and wingo in this position, yes <davexunit>I really need to work on guix environment, guix import pypi, and the minetest packaging, but I just can't find the motivation right now. :( <tadni>davexunit: How goes sly, in-general? If at all, currently? <davexunit>tadni: it's going alright. not much progress lately, though. <tadni>davexunit: I'm actually heard a fair amount of hype to people I've mentioned it to. :^) <tadni>Sly is probably my favorite, non-GNU system related Guile project -- that I've seen thusfar. <davexunit>I have some problems to solve before I'm happy enough to work on a release *tadni hopes that by 2016 he'll be able to do a gamejam with Sly running GNU Distro. :^) <tadni>I'm still going to probably have to get a new laptop, or find a way around this weird uefi issue... which maybe just figuring out how to generate a .iso for guix eventually. <tadni>That's still several packages away, till this is an issue anyways -- so I guess it doesn't matter much now. <tadni>Stumpwm and some wireless program, namely. <Sleep_Walker>I'm on SUSE Labs conference where Roberto di Cosmo (http://www.dicosmo.org/) had talk about package management and about dependency solvers etc, they're working on OPAM (http://opam.ocamlpro.com/) which is probably addressing similar problems as guix, maybe some cooperation could bring something good <Sleep_Walker>they're FSF and open source fans and the speech was really interesting... <Sleep_Walker>I'm on SUSE Labs conference where Roberto di Cosmo (http://www.dicosmo.org/) had talk about package management and about dependency solvers etc, they're working on OPAM (http://opam.ocamlpro.com/) which is probably addressing similar problems as guix, maybe some cooperation could bring something good <Sleep_Walker>they're FSF and open source fans and the speech was really interesting... <civodul>i know him, he's known Nix for some time etc. <civodul>Mancoosi has been addressing different issues, though <civodul>namely: on Debian, how do we know whether package dependency contraints can be satisfied? <civodul>this is a valid concern for APT, OPAM, etc., where packages are referenced using symbolic names <civodul>but in Guix and Nix, packages are referred to non-ambiguously <civodul>in Guix, as long as the compiler doesn't report an unbound variable, you're certain that the package is there <civodul>all that said, there may well be ideas to steal in all the work that has been done :-) <Sleep_Walker>well, my point is that these people, more from academic/research sphere are eager to work on RL problems and I took it as an opportunity to arrange contact, that's all <civodul>somehow, i probably reacted defensively, which was pointless ;-) <Sleep_Walker>I'm currently trying to check that CUDF stuff which is amazing - far more advanced than any package manager solver I faced so far (and I'm quite fond of openSUSE's zypper or guix ;) <civodul>AIUI it's not applicable to functional package managers, though <civodul>OCaml has "Lwt", which is cooperating multi-threading implemented as a monad <civodul>but monads in OCaml are terrible, because of the lack of macros <civodul>one has to use Camlp4 to get a bit of syntactic sugar <philed>Though I'm not sure I'd want to use monad transformers without a type-system, or generally combine monads. <philed>I'll have to have a go sometime. <civodul>i'm not entirely clear on monad transformers *davexunit got a really rough prototype version of 'guix environment' running this morning before he went to work <mark_weaver>I've been too distracted by David's rants to look at much else. <davexunit>so far, it reads in a list of packages, creates a new profile containing them in your $PWD, and outputs the necessary search paths to use the environment. <davexunit>a use-case: you want to hack on guile for the first time. so, you clone the git repo and run 'guix environment --install' <davexunit>and all of the packages necessary to build guile are installed in a special profile for you. <mark_weaver>I see, like a replacement for the popular python container-like-thingy? <davexunit>when I'm done with it, it will read in a package expression, and create an environment containing the dependencies of that package. <davexunit>other languages have their own. ruby has bundler, javascript has npm, php has composer, and on and on <davexunit>it's basically a specialized 'guix package' interface for development. <mark_weaver>yeah, it seems terrible that each language has its own. better to have guix handle it. <davexunit>there'd be a "Guixfile" (or whatever it's name will be) in the root of a project's source tree with all the necessary package details. <davexunit>rather than just output search paths, I want to be able to execute commands with it, like 'guix environment --exec guile --version' <davexunit>or 'guix environment --shell' to get essentially the same behavior of 'nix shell' <davexunit>thanks! I'm pretty excited about it. I spent the last 2 years dealing with complicated ruby development environments. having a sane packaging tool would have made all the difference. <davexunit>I would work with 4 or so ruby projects, each using different libraries and even different versions of ruby. the state-of-the-art tools to manage this in the ruby world are horrible. <davexunit>for example: the "ruby version manager", or rvm, would hijack the "cd" built-in of your shell to do special things. madness! <mark_weaver>I'm always glad to see more FSF folks visiting here :) <mark_weaver><-- former FSF staff sysadmin, GNU Guile maintainer, Guix contributor. <jgay>mark_weaver, I remember. I am hanging out here because I've started some initial work on importing package info from guix into the free software directory