Hi Pjotr, Am Donnerstag, den 29.04.2021, 07:44 +0200 schrieb Pjotr Prins: > Hi Leo (Prikler), > > On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 01:52:12AM +0200, Leo Prikler wrote: > > I don't know enough about marketing to give you a good answer on > > that, > > but when it comes to what we're competing against, it seems to be a > > rather uphill battle outside of the small bubble, that we've carved > > out. According to distrowatch we're still far away from Nix and > > back > > when I was using Gentoo I thought that was some super niche distro. > > As Guix is now also a Debian package I think it is doing extremely > well. I know people who are silently introducing Guix :). As a full > distro it may be niche, but it is also very successful because it > keeps growing and growing. Nix has a 10 years head start (I was > there) > and does better in industry, but it does not mean it wil be ahead in > another 10 years. > > Look where Linux came from. Point taken, we do still get some complaints from people running Guix on foreign distros and how we violate the expectations of those distros. But I do think sooner or later those would end up bumping statistics based on search terms at least a little.
> > Guix may perhaps not be the smallest package manager (to be honest, > > I have no way of telling as it's the only one I'm involved in), but > > I can definitely say, that it does things well, so your point about > > violating Unix philosophy is invalidated :P > > Guix abides by the Unix philosophy in many ways. All the tools (or > their invocations) do the minimum. It is actually an interesting > mixture of composition and isolation. Guix has the advantage of > learning from other attempts. But think about the Guix choice of > shepherd over systemd: systemd is not a tool in the spirit of Unix > (in my opinion) because it tries to think for you and can be > unpredictable :). Guix' focus is on being predictable and hackable - > i.e., very Unix spirited. I respectfully disagree, building a profile (or even better a system) is in no way "minimal", but it also doesn't need to be. Package management by Guix is appealing exactly because it *can* handle everything, particularly configuration in the case of Guix System, in the same way that service management through systemd is appealing to some because it *can* unify a lot of common concerns into one monolith. "Being predictable" is not a quality unique to Unix nor is it a quality guaranteed by Unix. Also we get a lot of unpredicted backtraces :) > > Which ties back to point 2. Guix aims to be inclusive and being > > inclusive means toning down the rudeness. > > That is true. Though rudeness can also serve a purpose (Linus comes > to mind though he is trying to tone down the last years) and some > people can't help it. We walk a fine line here when we tell people to > be less rude and lose some value if we can not be honest. There is a > cultural angle for sure. The Fins, Dutch, Russians and Germans can be > honest in their language, but that appears as rude in English. Common > English can be extremely rude in Japanese. I think, in an > intercultural sense, we ought to strive for not taking everything at > face value, and try reading beyond the surface. Some people are in > the autistic spectrum, do we shut them down and have them not > participate? I don't think that is particularly inclusive either. As a German native speaker learning Japanese, I am aware of some cultural tendencies, e.g. the polite rejection of a proposal. When it comes to being rude, the onus is absolutely on the person being rude to read the room. > Even so, if someone crosses a line with intent to hurt we should have > policies that protect the attacked. That is civil. But I'd argue > against judging people by popular opinion. Courts of law are there to > judge badness. Likewise, projects have policies and a code of > conduct. We should abide by those (the alternative being that people > can decide not to participate with the project). It is very hard, > perhaps impossible, to defend yourself against (perceived) popular > opinion. > > Character assassination on the internet is all to common now. What we > should aim for is trying to keep discussion technical in a technical > project, even is it is in reality also a social experiment - as all > of free software is and even humanity as a whole. The good news is > that almost all our discussions and choices can be technical. I think you might have misunderstood me her a bit, so let me rephrase that: I wasn't trying to advocate for lengthy, mostly political discussions in the mailing lists, but what I am trying to say, is that whenever people do express opinions, when those opinions are harmful (whether or not they are popular) we ought to stop them from spreading. > > - I don't think anyone has ever been offended by trees – it's > > usually the other way round – but there are (some reasonable and > > some less reasonable) arguments to support one's fear of spiders, > > both physical and digital. > > We had a cat that got stuck in a tree once. Since that time he looked > up and we could virtually see him think: trees are evil. He never > went up again. I don't know your cat, but it could very well be possible, that your interpretation is exaggerated. You can be afraid of someone or something without assuming ill intent. For instance, I am afraid, that Raghav might inadvertently push a poorly reviewed piece of code (especially in haste), but I also fear I myself might do harm, when in a few days I'll be forced to merge wip-emacs with only the knowledge, that no one has so far complained about my latest patch set. > Being inclusive actually implies celebrating our differences. That is true in the general case, but I just wanted to point out exceptions so as to make people aware of them. Regards, Leo
