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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.
<davexunit>oh whatever
<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>damn, this is terrible
<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.
<civodul>heh
<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>oh, good news :-)
<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?
<davexunit>I dunno.
*tadni wishes he was better with logo design.
<ijp>how about a two dead gnus crossed on a mount of dead gnus motif?
<ijp>mountain*
<davexunit>ijp in charge of marketing
<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>:)
<davexunit>thanks!
<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. :^)
<davexunit>that would be awesome. :)
<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.
<tadni>:^P
<talo>hi
<civodul>Hello Guix!
<Ulrar>Hi civodul
<Sleep_Walker>hello people
<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>also check http://www.mancoosi.org/cudf/
<Sleep_Walker>hi civodul
<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>also check http://www.mancoosi.org/cudf/
<Sleep_Walker>(sorry for repeating that)
<civodul>hello Sleep_Walker
<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>oh yes, sure
<civodul>it's a good idea, thanks :-)
<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>yes, it's very fancy
<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
<civodul>conclusion: Scheme is cool :-)
<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>yeah
<civodul>i'm not entirely clear on monad transformers
*civodul has to go
*davexunit got a really rough prototype version of 'guix environment' running this morning before he went to work
<mark_weaver>davexunit: ooh what does it do?
<mark_weaver>(maybe I need to catch up on guix-devel?)
<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>how is it different than "guix package -i" ?
<mark_weaver>oh, current environment.
<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.
<mark_weaver>(forgetting its name)
<davexunit>yes. virtual-env.
<mark_weaver>right. sounds great!
<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.
<mark_weaver>great stuff :) you're on quite a roll!
<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!
<jgay>Hello guix
<mark_weaver>greetings, jgay!
<mark_weaver>I'm always glad to see more FSF folks visiting here :)
<mark_weaver>(we met briefly at GNU 30th)
<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
<mark_weaver>oh, excellent!
<mark_weaver>please let me know if you have any questions