On Thu, Feb 01 2024, Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." wrote: > On Thu, Nov 30 2023, Attila Lendvai wrote: >> the use of 'service' to describe two rather different abstractions: a >> component of an OS vs. a deamon process run by shepherd. > > Indeed, the use of 'service' in much of Guix appears to be a grand > misnomer. It probably occurred because the meaning expanded over time.
We can actually point to a specific moment when the meaning was expanded. It was done in Guix 0.9.0: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2015/gnu-guix-090-released/ Here is a blog post introducing services back in 2015, which has a heading "Services Beyond Daemons" which discusses the change to broaden the term to encompass what Guix now calls a service: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2015/service-composition-in-guixsd/ There is also a talk that Ludovic gave at FOSDEM 2017 where he discusses the ideas of Guix services (I can't remember the content of this, but it seemed like it might be relevant): https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/composingsystemservicesinguixsd/ This doesn't seem like accidental concept creep. This was an intentional decision to use the word "service" to mean something specific. I say this to note that any argument to change the term should first understand why this decision was made (see: Chesterton's Fence). Carlo
