Thomas Ingram <[email protected]> skribis: > On 03/26/2016 07:39 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >> Personally, I would like to view the “wizard” as a helper, and not as >> something that hides everything and turns people into “end users.” >> >> I don’t know how this could translate in the design of the tool. >> Perhaps showing the ‘operating-system’ declaration as you suggest is one >> thing, and making it easy to view the section of the manual that >> corresponds to a particular item, or to jump to the code that defines a >> specific service (say), would be helpful too. > Yes as much as it is an installer it should also be an > introduction. Something that not only lets a user easily input their > options but also shows them how their settings will be put into > config.scm, I'm trying to come up with some clever ideas of how to do > this in a graceful way.
Awesome. > Basically I was thinking of doing that with an ncurses UI that shows > the user their config.scm with some documentation and then walks users > through changing each option. But maybe an emacs installer makes more > sense as this is the type of interface emacs does very well. > > The reason I had avoided proposing an emacs installer previously is I > worry about confusion from users who are unfamiliar with emacs and how > to use it. Should we be concerned with that when so many of Guix's > great features that can be accessed through emacs. Perhaps there could > be a simple introduction to emacs in the installer as well? On the > other hand if a user has no experience with emacs throwing that at > them along with config.scm could be overwhelming. I understand your concern. I think that in this case, Emacs should be viewed as a UI toolkit: just like someone using an ncurses program doesn’t have to learn the ncurses API, someone using an Emacs-based UI doesn’t have to learn Emacs. It just happens that Emacs is a full-featured UI toolkit, especially when it comes to Guix things. For instance, it already has all we need to display and navigate source code (from an ‘operating-system’ configuration, one can contextual documentation, jump to procedure/variable definitions, etc.), to navigate packages, and so on. Having said that, I think that if you’re more comfortable writing Guile and ncurses code than Emacs code for this project, then that’s perfectly fine, of course. Thanks, Ludo’.
