Re: Git-LFS or Git Annex?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

git-annex, 1% :)

It's not as popular, but it's much more powerful, and is some of my
favorite software!

Ludovic Courtès  writes:

> Hello!
>
> I’m looking for ways to incorporate videos into the repositories of our
> web sites so they’re content-addressed and properly tracked, and to make
> it easier to create backups (right now those videos are stored on our
> two main servers and rsynced between them⁰; I’m talking about the videos
> at guix.gnu.org, 10years.guix.gnu.org, and hpc.guix.info).
>
> The question boils down to: Git-LFS or Git Annex?
>
> From a quick look (I haven’t used them), Git-LFS seems to assume a
> rather centralized model where there’s an LFS server sitting next to the
> Git server¹.  Git Annex looks more decentralized, allowing you to have
> several “remotes”, to check the status of each one, to sync them, etc.²
> Because of this, Git Annex seems to be a better fit.
>
> Data point: guix.gnu.org source is hosted on Savannah, which doesn’t
> support Git-LFS; the two other web sites above are hosted on GitLab
> instances, which I think do support Git-LFS.
>
> What’s your experience?  What would you suggest?
>
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.
>
> ⁰ 
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/berlin.scm#n193
> ¹ https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/wiki/Tutorial
> ² https://git-annex.branchable.com/walkthrough/

Re: ActtivityPub and Haunt

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

indieterminacy  writes:

> As can be imagined, some of these softwares have stacks which Guix is
> not so usually adept at packaging.

As a side note, I suspect the major paint point of *all* of these
systems, which is the Javascript side for user-facing interface stuff,
can at last have a path out we can help contribute to without needing to
untangle NPM and friends: Spritely's Hoot project should allow us to
deliver browser-side scheme execution very soon!

That will make Guile a *much* more interesting target for web
development :)

 - Christine

Re: Guix Days and Fosdem 2024

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Very excited for FOSDEM / Guix Days 2024!  Definitely think there's been
plenty happening in Spritely-land that we'll have some things we want to
get in front of people, and conversations about how we can best work
with the greater Guile/Guix ecosystem.

 - Christine

Re: ActtivityPub and Haunt

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

"Thompson, David"  writes:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 11:48 AM indieterminacy
>  wrote:
>>
>> In wider fediverse news,
>>
>> The ActivityPub webpage is getting a rejig:
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-from-standards-movement-to-grassroots-fedi/3577
>>
>> Im emailing, as within the technical discourse page is whether the tech
>> stack should be moved away from (scheme based) Haunt (which powers
>> Guix's website):
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-technical-discussion/3578
>>
>> Naturally, Id be keen on continuing the furrow carved by Christine
>> Lemmer-Webber and thought it would be worth seeing if there are any
>> Lispers here who would be keen on volunteering, lest the platform goes
>> Typescript.
>>
>> At my end, I consider the benefits to i18n to be a useful synergy:
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-technical-discussion/3578/3
>>
>> If you agree, Id love you contribute your input there.
>
> I'm the creator and maintainer of Haunt. I can't volunteer time to
> maintain activitypub.rocks but I can help answer questions about Haunt
> and help with bug fixes, patch review, etc. for Haunt itself. Haunt
> posts can be written in Markdown, BTW.  You don't have to layer on the
> obscurity by using a format like Skribe (even though Skribe is cool.)
> I haven't integrated anything i18n related in Haunt itself because I
> don't know a lot about it, but Guix being able to add in i18n on top
> of what Haunt provides is a good sign that it's workable. I'm totally
> open to include built-in i18n features in future releases.
>
> I also understand and sympathize that keeping Haunt will probably be
> swimming upstream against the pressure to be more mainstream.  I guess
> a positive spin on things is that ActivityPub has succeeded enough to
> call attention to all the Scheme that was cleverly snuck in when
> Christine was the driving force of the project. It's been a small
> point of pride that activitypub.rocks was built with Haunt, so it
> would be a bit disappointing to see it go away, but I understand that
> whatever is easiest for the volunteers actually doing the work is the
> right thing. Scheme is *obviously* better than TypeScript, though. ;)
>
> - Dave

I'd love to see ap.rocks maintained in its Haunt form.  I'm not so sure
we're going to see it happen.  It's more important that it continues and
survives I suppose, ultimately... and the people maintaining it will
have to make the decisions on what tools they want to use.

But I will hands-down say that Haunt was an EXCELLENT environment for
writing ap.rocks.  The implementation guide page especially is a great
demonstration of Haunt's power:

  https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/

Check out reports.scm:

  
https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/-/blob/master/www/reports.scm?ref_type=heads

Pretty cool, yeah?  Well, I thought so... I can't imagine doing anything
like that as easily in any of the other static site generators I've
used.

Which was autogenerated from reports that used the AP test suite (also
Guile based, and sadly long down... though someone's been working on
reviving (and rewriting) it...)

Haunt treats a website as a program and its output as evaluating that
program.  That combined with sxml is a really cool environment.  Most of
the rest of the world hasn't realized as such I guess.  Oh well...

 - Christine

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Nathan Dehnel  writes:

> 
>
>> Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
>> discussion on contributing to guix.
>>
>> Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
>> itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
>> to guix, all without using emacs.
>>
>> I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
>> For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
>> I don't use it myself.
>
> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
> kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
> rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
> using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> screwing around with it.
>
> https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
> This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
> attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
> to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
> expertise) to set it up for myself.

Happy to see this talk get some attention.  It does advocate a variety
of possible approaches, one of them Wisp (and the wisp-mode colored
block stuff is pretty awesome).

If you like that approach and want to not have to do the
parenthesis-balancing as much yourself, there's an interesting overlap
between Wisp and parinfer, which automatically infers the parentheses
from whitespace but keeps them in the actual source.  I have personally
never tried using parinfer for serious tasks though.  It still requires
an editor set up for those features.

Since Spritely is also using Guile heavily, we have also spent a lot of
time talking about possible directions for helping non-emacs-users get
going with our tooling.  Personally I think the biggest path to success
is likely to be seeing Guile support (starting with parenthetical Guile)
also be very strong in mainstream editors.  A lot has changed in the
programming editor world recently: LSP looks like a very promising
direction for this.  (Anyway, there's no decisionmaking yet in terms of
what we're doing, it just has come up quite a bit.)

Has anyone tried using an LSP-like environment and seeing if they can
get something approximating the comfort that Guile and Geiser users in
emacs have, I wonder?  I have seen there are a couple of guile LSP
packages but I have not personally tried them.

 - Christine

Re: GOOPS-less Shepherd

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Ludovic Courtès  writes:

> Hello!
>
> I’d like to release the Shepherd 0.10.0 in a few weeks at most, with the
> hope that it’ll be the last stable series before 1.0, which would be
> released in a few months.
>
> As part of this, I’d like to clean up the API, which includes removing
> the dependency on GOOPS.  The Shepherd had been using GOOPS from the
> start but for no particular reason: there’s no inheritance and only a
> couple of cases of method overloading.

Neat!

"Obviously" Shepherd should use Spritely Goblins, which also does not
use GOOPS ;D

> I started that work, which mostly involves renaming things like
> accessors following typical Scheme conventions:
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/shepherd.git/log/?h=wip-goopsless

404s for me.

> I imagine the following deprecation scenario:
>
>   • 0.10.x would still support GOOPS, as in (make  …), but
> that would be deprecated in favor of a more Schemey (service …)
> form.  Under the hood it’s still GOOPS.
>
>   • 1.0.x would no longer use GOOPS at all.  We could provide a ‘make’
> macro so that (make  …) would still kinda work.
>
> What’s at stake, mostly, is the ability to reconfigure a long-running
> shepherd instance.  Once 1.0.x is in Guix, ‘guix system reconfigure’
> will most likely fail to upgrade services on a pre-0.10.x shepherd:
> users will have to reboot.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ludo’.

Re: Arun Isaac Presentation on guix-forge this Saturday

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Ludovic Courtès  writes:

> Hello Arun!
>
> Too bad I missed the event on Saturday.
>
> Arun Isaac  skribis:
>
>> guix-forge is a Guix service that, ambitiously, tries to reproduce a
>> sourcehut, GitHub or GitLab like code forge, but using only
>> off-the-shelf components like cgit, laminar, public-inbox, etc. The idea
>> is to enable users to write a few lines of Guix operating-system
>> configuration code, and have an entire code forge deployed and
>> ready. guix-forge is similar to projects like FreedomBox, YunoHost and
>> Mail-in-a-Box, but for code forges and built on the rock-solid
>> foundation that is Guix.
>
> This is really nice.  I like the idea of having easy deployment through
> a Guix service, and of composing existing tools.  (It’d even be worth a
> blog post, hint hint ;-))
>
>> For now, only the laminar CI feature is in place. In the presentation, I
>> will show a setup of laminar CI with guix-forge. On every git commit to
>> a project repo, the CI will
>> - automatically run tests for the project
>> - build and deploy a static project website
>>
>> If you would like to take a sneak peek of a guix-forge configuration,
>> there is a simple example in the Tutorial section of the manual at
>> https://guix-forge.systemreboot.net/manual/dev/en/
>>
>> For a more complex real world configuration that, among other things,
>> does continuous deployment of a web service, you can look at the
>> guix-forge configuration for genenetwork.org at
>> https://git.genenetwork.org/arunisaac/genenetwork-machines . The Laminar
>> CI deployed by this configuration is at https://ci.genenetwork.org/
>
> Neat.  I wonder if there could be a more Guiley flavor of guix-forge,
> for instance with Gitile instead of Cgit and mumi instead of
> public-inbox (though these two are not quite equivalent).
>
> Thanks for sharing!
>
> Ludo’.

And cuirass? :)

Re: FSDG issues of SCUMMVM-based games

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

I thought I remembered that "Beneath a Steel Sky" was released by its
authors under GPLv2 to some applause back in the day.  I remember that's
why I installed and played it...

It's mentioned here at least:
  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky#Freeware_release_and_Remastered_edition

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice  writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hi Liliana,
>
> Liliana Marie Prikler 写道：
>> The packages
>> - drascula,
>
> […]
>
>> 1. Their license explicitly prohibits selling of the games
>> themselves
>> and may thus be qualified as non-free.
>
> Yep, it's pretty explicit, and I agree that it's an unreasonable
> restriction that makes the software non-free.
>
>> 2. The "sources" consist of binaries that are installed as-is.
>
> Wow, you weren't kidding.  Of the 1145(!) or 63 MiB(!) of files,
> literally not one is source code.
>
> At best, the archive contains 3 ‘text’ files: one with only numbers,
> one with only asterisks, and one with only blank lines.
>
>> - lure,
>> - queen, and
>> - sky
>
> I didn't check these, but I believe you if you say they're just as
> bad.
>
> I see no way to keep these in Guix.
>
> Thanks!
>
> T G-R
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

Re: An appeal to empathy on actual hurt caused by this thread

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Taylan,

You asked me to take the time to explain the hurt you caused, and I did.
I spent a whole day on it.  It was not easy.  In response you provided a
long justification backing up the very thing you were asked not to do,
the very thing identified as causing this much hurt.

But you've made it, beyond a doubt, abundantly clear that this is
exactly what you intended to do, at least.

I hope we never see something unfold like this on this, or any related,
mailing list again.

 - Christine

Re: An appeal to empathy on actual hurt caused by this thread

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Okay.  Now a longer reply.  I am taking a substantial portion of my day
to do this.  I think there is a lot more going on here than even appears
at the surface.  So I have re-read everything that has been said so far
and am doing my best to take care in what I write here.  I hope it's of
some greater help and contribution for the health and well being of this
community, which I cherish.

Taylan Kammer  writes:

> Hi Christine,
>
> Thank you for opening up.  It was definitely not apparent to me that you
> had such a reaction to the thread.  As we know, text doesn't convey the
> nuances of human communication very well, and I had read your initial
> emails as rather relaxed, or at worst mildly annoyed.  Had I realized
> that they were coming from such a stressful position, I would have
> responded differently.

For whatever it's worth, at the point that I composed the email, I was
anxious.

> My heartfelt apologies in that regard.

Apology (personally) accepted.  I can't speak for others of course, but
it is my hope that we as a community can find healing and understanding
and move forward.  And I believe you when you say this was not your
intent.

I also appreciate you being open and thoughtful throughout the rest of
this email.  Know that this, and the previous, emails were not easy for
me to write.  I wrote them from a position of disclosure and
vulnerability.

But not writing them would be worse.  I am glad I did write it, because
(and obviously, I won't talk about the specifics), I received replies
from some folks in private saying they felt their experiences mirrored
and it may have affected their participation in Guix, and had already
affected their feeling of safety and self-identity.  Not to mention my
own felings.

> For us to be able to build up better mutual understanding and empathy in
> the future, perhaps it would be good for me to open up about some things
> as well.

Certainly not a thing requied to do, but I appreciate it.

> Frankly, I think we're more similar than anyone taking a glance at the
> thread might ever think.  I've had experiences with gender dysphoria as
> well, and my dis-identification with male peers has certainly played an
> important role in the development of my severe chronic depression.
>
> I'm a rather reserved person when it comes to personal matters, not as
> open about my feelings as you are (and good on you -- it's not doing me
> much good to be the way I am in that regard), so I don't want to go into
> too much detail, but let's just say I've had multiple near-death moments
> throughout the years in relation to my condition, and the latest bout of
> severe suicidal thoughts was just a few months ago.

I'm sorry to hear it.

> The partly hostile responses (from others, not you!) I've received in
> the thread have been anything but pleasant, to say the least, but have
> not led to a major breakdown, perhaps thanks to the medication I'm on,
> which might be why I was able to respond a few more times...

I am sorry, again, to hear about your dealing with depression, or that
you have had to undergo any breakdowns at all.

As for "partly hostile responses", I'd like to respond to this more
later, at the end of this thread.

> I've packaged higan for Guix, back in 2015.  Near (then byuu) helped me
> revitalize some of my fondest childhood memories with the emulator he's
> built.  After taking some interest in the program's workings, I was also
> briefly active on his web forum, and had positive interactions with him.
> We weren't close personally, but I had built up a *lot* of fondness and
> respect for him.  The news of his suicide was absolutely awful to me.
>
> Moreover, a certain web forum that shall not be named which was behind
> the bullying campaign against Near/byuu (and countless others) also has
> a "profile" of sorts written up on me in one of their threads, as a
> potential future bullying target or something.  So far I've been spared,
> but they do have my home address, and my employer's details are a web
> search away.
>
> All of which is to say, I *deeply* empathize with your position, and at
> no point would I ever wish to inflict this type of pain on anyone.

I'm truly sorry you had to experience that.  Nobody deserves that.

Though (and not to undo the previous two sentences) I will say, the
choice of "he" for Near gave me most pause in this email, given the
thread's existing context of gender consierations, and that Near
identified as nonbinary as far as I understand, and that this and their
autism were partly why they were bullied into suicide...

> I would like to sincerely reassure you that the sole purpose in sending
> the patch, and subsequent messages, was to pledge for another view to be
> respected on equal regard to the one that's already correctly respected.
>
> The reason I've felt strongly about that, pressing me to reiterate the
> position in the subsequent thread by Zimoun, was of course not some
> twisted wish to cause hurt.  Rather, 

Re: An appeal to empathy on actual hurt caused by this thread

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

tate opposing that."
>
> And in the summary:
>
>   "I sincerely have no issue with the CoC protecting people based on
>   gender identity or other transgender status, and am equally
>   disinterested as others in having debates about that topic."
>
> Yet something seems to have gone wrong.
>
> There was one email, my response to Liliana, in which I've touched on
> the debate itself, but that was even before your emails so I don't
> think it was that...
>
> Reading over my mails, I just don't understand why they might have been
> misunderstood so badly.  If you could shed some light on that, I would be
> very grateful!  It would certainly help me avoid mistakes in the future,
> if I were to talk about these matters in a different place.
>
>
> I hope this message reaches you in the empathetic way it's meant.  I've
> decided to sacrifice about half a night's sleep to write it, because it
> was certainly important enough for that.  Well, I probably wouldn't have
> been able to sleep anyway. :-)
>
> Kindly,
>
> Taylan
>
>
> On 25.02.2022 20:42, Christine Lemmer-Webber wrote:
>> Taylan, I respect you and your work.  I don't think you realize how much
>> hurt you've caused here, and I want to take your contributions at good
>> faith.  But this has continued for days and it has definitely hurt a
>> lot.
>> 
>> I just got out of a presentation that I've been in crunchmode preparing
>> for all week.  It was a technically intense presentation with a demo
>> that required a lot of engineering effort to get there.  I was stressed
>> enough.  But the demo went well.  Everyone was excited, including me.
>> 
>> I got off the call, and normally what I would feel after something ended
>> like that was relief.  But I didn't feel relieved.  I felt... tired.
>> 
>> And then I started crying uncontrollably for over an hour.  Because the
>> pressure of the presentation was so great that I had to push down and
>> push down all the feelings I had about what was happening on this
>> thread, but when it was over, they overflowed.
>> 
>> And I don't believe, I don't want to believe, you meant to cause harm or
>> hurt.  You have several messages recently clearly indicating that you
>> feel you have been accused of things.  This is not an accusation.  This
>> is an appeal to empathy.
>> 
>> Normally I would have left this be quiet, or send an email one-on-one,
>> when things reached this stage.  But I tried to help this conversation
>> end in quiet, and it hasn't happened, and it's been days.  So I'm
>> relaying my experiences here.
>> 
>> Taylan Kammer  writes:
>> 
>>> On 24.02.2022 14:21, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I suspect you haven't properly read any of my mails and jumped to 
>>>>> conclusions
>>>>> based on a quick skim, or something like that.
>>>>
>>>> Well, I've been reading them and some people told you to stop and you still
>>>> continue. People already told you were bothering them.
>>>
>>> I haven't posted anything after Andy and Oliver asked to take it off-list,
>>> other than responding to Blake's accusation of course.
>>>
>>> Before that, nobody told me to stop or that I was bothering them, unless I
>>> missed it?
>> 
>> I did...
>> 
>> And maybe you missed it, but I definitely did.  I *definitely* did.
>> This was on Monday, it is now Friday.  Here's what I said across my
>> two emails:
>> 
>>  - I had already expressed that my very first reaction was wanting to
>>support broader language but NOT to have a debate about trans experiences:
>> 
>>> My first thought when looking at the top of this thread was,
>>> 'well I would be okay with adding a word if it isn't an *entry point*
>>> for debating trans experiences on list' but it looks like it's likely
>>> to be so
>> 
>>  - And then I said that, as a person affected, I didn't feel comfortable
>>debating these topics on a technical mailing list:
>> 
>>> I'm a transwoman with intersex characteristics.  I've certainly
>>> read a ton about sexual and gender therory, have read plenty of
>>> books on it and I can say without a doubt that I really just don't
>>> feel comfortable debating these topics on a technical mailing list.
>> 
>>  - And then, when I saw your email where you had pulled back, I tried
>>to help everything close in a way that was friendly:
>>
>>> Ah okay, hadn't seen this post before I

An appeal to empathy on actual hurt caused by this thread

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Taylan, I respect you and your work.  I don't think you realize how much
hurt you've caused here, and I want to take your contributions at good
faith.  But this has continued for days and it has definitely hurt a
lot.

I just got out of a presentation that I've been in crunchmode preparing
for all week.  It was a technically intense presentation with a demo
that required a lot of engineering effort to get there.  I was stressed
enough.  But the demo went well.  Everyone was excited, including me.

I got off the call, and normally what I would feel after something ended
like that was relief.  But I didn't feel relieved.  I felt... tired.

And then I started crying uncontrollably for over an hour.  Because the
pressure of the presentation was so great that I had to push down and
push down all the feelings I had about what was happening on this
thread, but when it was over, they overflowed.

And I don't believe, I don't want to believe, you meant to cause harm or
hurt.  You have several messages recently clearly indicating that you
feel you have been accused of things.  This is not an accusation.  This
is an appeal to empathy.

Normally I would have left this be quiet, or send an email one-on-one,
when things reached this stage.  But I tried to help this conversation
end in quiet, and it hasn't happened, and it's been days.  So I'm
relaying my experiences here.

Taylan Kammer  writes:

> On 24.02.2022 14:21, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
>> 
>>> I suspect you haven't properly read any of my mails and jumped to 
>>> conclusions
>>> based on a quick skim, or something like that.
>> 
>> Well, I've been reading them and some people told you to stop and you still
>> continue. People already told you were bothering them.
>
> I haven't posted anything after Andy and Oliver asked to take it off-list,
> other than responding to Blake's accusation of course.
>
> Before that, nobody told me to stop or that I was bothering them, unless I
> missed it?

I did...

And maybe you missed it, but I definitely did.  I *definitely* did.
This was on Monday, it is now Friday.  Here's what I said across my
two emails:

 - I had already expressed that my very first reaction was wanting to
   support broader language but NOT to have a debate about trans experiences:

   > My first thought when looking at the top of this thread was,
   > 'well I would be okay with adding a word if it isn't an *entry point*
   > for debating trans experiences on list' but it looks like it's likely
   > to be so

 - And then I said that, as a person affected, I didn't feel comfortable
   debating these topics on a technical mailing list:

   > I'm a transwoman with intersex characteristics.  I've certainly
   > read a ton about sexual and gender therory, have read plenty of
   > books on it and I can say without a doubt that I really just don't
   > feel comfortable debating these topics on a technical mailing list.

 - And then, when I saw your email where you had pulled back, I tried
   to help everything close in a way that was friendly:
   
   > Ah okay, hadn't seen this post before I replied.
   >
   > It seems the issue is closed then.  Look forward to everyone getting
   > back to hacking. :)

Shortly thereafter I stepped away from my computer and went downstairs
and went downstairs to prepare lunch.  Morgan, my wife (who is also a
Guix user, btw) said, "Are you okay?  You look stressed."

And I relayed what happened on this thread.

"Is *that* what's being debated on this list?  I'm not a Guix
*developer*, but I am a Guix *user*.  That kind of gender essentialism
makes me both really want to join the mailing list so I can weigh in
and really *not* want to have to weigh in because I don't want to have
to deal with all that.  That's not the kind of community I want to
participate in."

We co-presented at the FOSDEM room together in the "Lisp but Beautiful,
Lisp for Everyone" talk.  A major portion of the talk was about Guix.
Another major portion of the talk (since "who's representing feminism"
keeps coming up) was about Morgan's experiences *writing her
dissertation using a markup language which is secretly a lisp dialect*
on "Women and Wool Working in Ancient Rome".  Her PhD, Masters, Major,
and Minor were all embedded in gender and sexual analysis through the
lived experiences of women, primarily cisgender, throughout history.
No matter how many books you and I have read on gender and sexuality,
I can guarantee you Morgan has read more.

Anyway if there are any other cisgender women who have presented about
Guix in a video presentation I would be pleased, but as far as I know,
she's the only one I've seen do so.  Corrections extremely welcome.
Active steps to pull more women into our community, strongly encouraged.

But at the time I said, "Oh, I think it wrapped up.  The person who
raised it backpedaled and I tried to be friendly in softening the
closing by saying 'cool let's all get back to hacking!' so I don't think
we have to worry about it 

Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

I am all for these conversations; they are good to have as a society, to
examine our social foundations in earnest dialogue.  But I think they've
approached a point on here where they're no longer about Guix
development, in particular, so probably should be moved off-list.

Martin Becze  writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> My point to here is not to argue a "libertarian" viewpoint (I'm not
> one), but to argue that there or other consideration to mining crypto 
> and that it is outside the realm of the free software movement from
> which Guix's package inclusion policy is derived. You or I might not 
> like or agree with the over viewpoints but that should be fine with in
> the context of free software and operating systems. This is also 
> foundational to liberalism and having a functional government in the
> first place.
>
>> Who is going to pay and provide all of this
> I personal think it would be wonderful if governments focused on
> providing those things and mechanism such as the harbinger tax could
> be great and removing control of the monetary supply from the state
> would greatly reduce its ability to fund military expenditures. For
> reference David graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is an interesting
> narrative of how money's evolution was impart driven by the waging of
> mass war.
>
> On 2/24/22 10:23, Hartmut Goebel wrote:
>
>> CW: politics below
>>
>> Am 20.02.22 um 21:39 schrieb Martin Becze:
>>> But undermining the governments ability to raise tax and therefor
>>> to wage war or not expending energy to prevent government theft is
>>> the ‘controversial morality’ that I am sure can be agreed to death
>>> and which probably doesn't belong on this list. 
>>
>> Undermining the governments ability to raise tax also means
>> undermining the ability to build schools, kindergartens, public 
>> libraries, public transport, streets, etc. Who is going to pay and
>> provide all of this, If there is no democratically controlled(*) 
>> government?
>>
>> You might argument that this will then be paid be wealthy people -
>> but the country will depend solely on their will and want. And these 
>> wealthy people are not controlled at all. And these people might
>> wage war, too. We already had such a system in the medieval
>> time. It:s called feudalism.
>>
>> So nothing is won by undermining the government.
>>
>> (*) Democratic control still needs a lot of improvement. Esp. in the
>> USA where „the winner takes it all“ results in a two-party system, 
>> which does not represent the people. But this is another issue.
>>
>>
>
> [2. OpenPGP public key --- application/pgp-keys; 
> OpenPGP_0xB97E95F9DED5755D.asc]...
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

Re: [minor patch] Amend CoC

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Taylan Kammer  writes:

> On 20.02.2022 22:37, Thiago Jung Bauermann wrote:
>> 
>> Taylan Kammer  writes:
>> 
>>> Just one remark for them: most women I know would think twice before
>>> spending time trying to get into a community whose rules intentionally
>>> don't acknowledge sex-based discrimination.
>> 
>> Honest question, because (IIUC) this is the whole point of having a CoC:
>> 
>> Do those women believe that “… harassment-free experience for everyone,
>> regardless of … gender identity and expression, … or sexual identity and
>> orientation.” would not cover any potential harassment that they could
>> be subjected to while participating in Guix’s community?
>
> If no characteristics were listed at all, it wouldn't matter, but if there's
> a long list yet 'sex' is explicitly excluded, that seems rather hostile,
> even if it doesn't mean that Guix maintainers would actually ignore
> harassment that happened on the grounds of someone's sex.
>
> Happy to talk more about this off-list.  As it stands I'm rather embarrassed
> that this thread immediately blew up and wish I hadn't posted it at all now.

Ah okay, hadn't seen this post before I replied.

It seems the issue is closed then.  Look forward to everyone getting
back to hacking. :)

Re: [minor patch] Amend CoC

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Taylan Kammer  writes:

> On 20.02.2022 19:05, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
>>> Note: The upstream Contributor Covenant wouldn't want to include it
>>> because the author seems to have a peculiar world-view where they
>>> don't acknowledge that humans actually have a sex.  I hope the Guix
>>> maintainers are more reasonable than that. :-)
>> Sorry, but tracking down the issue you submitted towards the
>> contributor covenant, it appears to me that you are the misguided one.
>> The CoC already prohibits discrimination based on gender identity,
>> sexual identity and sexual orientation.  If you identify your gender as
>> your sex, whatever that might be, you are thereby already protected.
>> 
>> The wording you chose (intentionally or otherwise) tries to invalidate
>> other people's gender identity and thus violates the CoC.
>> 
>> Cheers
>
> I had really hoped this would be an uncontroversial suggestion...
>
> It might be useful to provide a link in case others want to take a look at
> the debate as well:
>
> https://github.com/EthicalSource/contributor_covenant/pull/548
>
> I've said everything there I'd say now if I were to argue back, and I really
> don't want to argue about this on a Guix ML anyway, so I'll leave it to the
> maintainers to decide what to do.  Just one remark for them: most women I
> know would think twice before spending time trying to get into a community
> whose rules intentionally don't acknowledge sex-based discrimination.

My first thought when looking at the top of this thread was, "well I
would be okay with adding a word if it isn't an *entry point* for
debating trans experiences on list" but it looks like it's likely to be
so:

  
https://github.com/EthicalSource/contributor_covenant/pull/548#issuecomment-399692924

So I share Liliana's concerns.  I think it looks like the conversation
on-list is already going in that direction.  It looks like it did on the
referenced pull request already too.

I'm a transwoman with intersex characteristics.  I've certainly read a
ton about sexual and gender therory, have read plenty of books on it and
I can say without a doubt that I really just don't feel comfortable
debating these topics on a technical mailing list.

I don't want to put any assertions of intention in here either, but just
state that it looks like this is already opening that kind of experience
here, the concerns that this could be an "entry point" for that kind of
back and forth already seems to be playing out, and I that makes this
not a "minor patch" to me.

At any rate, the CoC already says "gender identity and expression" and
"sexual identity and orientation".  Seems that already covers a broad
ground to me.

 - Christine

Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Taylan Kammer  writes:

> On 20.02.2022 11:05, Maxime Devos wrote:
>> 
>> Guix has a policy against including malware[citation needed 2], and
>> furthering global warming[3] (and energy prices[4], if [3] is not bad
>> enough for you) seems rather bad behaviour to me.
>> 
>> Would these miners be considered malware in Guix?
>> 
> I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies at all, but I don't like the idea of
> excluding software from Guix on the grounds that it's harmful in some
> indirect way.
>
> Malware is software that harms/exploits the user without their knowledge.
> The inefficiency of cryptocurrencies was never a secret, though people
> didn't think much about it; recently it's become widespread knowledge, so
> I think considering crypto miners to be malware is somewhat unreasonable.
>
> An example of actual malware would be a *hidden* crypto miner that sends
> the mined coins to the author of the software.

I think that's a good analysis.  Software which installs a crytpo-miner
*without a user's knowledge* is a serious problem.

> If we're going to exclude software on grounds of it being used in harmful
> ways, I can already see people arguing that one should exclude software
> such as aircrack-ng for aiding in breaching into networks, or anonymity
> software like Tor because it aids perverts in sharing you-know-what or
> aids terrorists in planning attacks.  Slippery slopes and all.

I agree... I'm also conscious that it'll put Guix in a position where
this will be a large portion of the work that Guix is doing is screening
software on a very large number of grounds, whereas we already screen
software much more so than most places.  It could absorb a lot of our
energy.  It's easy to underestimate just how all-consuming this could
become.

I share criticisms of proof-of-work.  Though some of the criticisms
being raised on this list are treating "blockchains" and
"cryptocurrencies" as if they even were one coherent thing.  In reality
the variance space of this is huge:

  https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-is-a-blockchain-really/

You'll see plenty of my own criticisms coming up in there.  But part of
my issue is, it's worth being precise about what's being criticized.
For instance, "proof of stake" has other problems (arguably still has
plutocratic properties), but not the energy consumption issue.  Most of
the discourse contemporarily is acting as if both are the same.  But
even proof of stake based systems are often being built on top of
software that's being refactored from "proof of work".

I think this activism criticizing design choices along these lines *is*
worthwhile, but building alternatives and getting them adopted may be a
stronger choice.  I'd like to replace proof-of-work based systems
largely; there are under-appreciated directions that even predate
Bitcoin dramatically that are worth exploring.

Relatedly, the title of this is: "Excessively energy-consuming software
considered malware?"  That's broad enough that it could also put a lot
of emphasis on "don't use inefficient languages" (actually that's how I
misread what the subject of this thread originally before opening it).
That's worthwhile also, but similarly, is Guix's package repository
acceptance/rejection the right place?

> One might argue that those pieces of software also have good uses, but
> the same could be argued about a crypto miner: perhaps I want to install
> one simply to study its operation to aide in some sort of research, maybe
> even research about its inherent inefficiency.  Or maybe I want to devise
> a small-scale blockchain-based network for a niche use-case where the
> blockchain won't reach an unwieldy size or will be limited in lifetime.
>
> All in all, I think the baseline is that if something is software, and it
> respects the user's freedoms, it belongs in Guix.
>
> What do you think?  I'm happy to have my mind changed.  I've never used a
> crypto miner and continue to be disinterested in them so don't care about
> this particular case all that much, but the principle behind the reasoning
> bothers me somewhat.

Re: License of your contributions to the blog at guix.gnu.org

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

I'm good with it!

Ludovic Courtès  writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hello,
>
> I am emailing you on behalf of the GNU Guix project because you are the
> author or coauthor of one or more articles to the blog at
> .
>
> With a few exceptions, these articles do not have a clear license, which
> we would like to fix.  We propose to dual-license all the articles under
> CC-BY-SA 4.0 and GFDL version 1.3 or later, with no Invariant Sections,
> no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
>
> Do you agree with the proposed licensing terms for your contributions to
> the blog?
>
> If you do, please reply to this message to say so, keeping
> guix-devel@gnu.org Cc’d (if you already replied in the previous thread,
> you do not need to reply again).
>
> If you would prefer different licensing terms, or if you have any
> questions, feel free to ask them publicly on guix-devel@gnu.org or
> privately with guix-maintain...@gnu.org.
>
> The clarified license will allow us and others to reuse material in the
> manual, cookbook, and in other free cultural works.  See
> 
> for the initial discussion.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Ludo’.
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

Re: Tricking peer review

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Ludovic Courtès  writes:

> It builds just fine:
>
> $ guix build -f /tmp/content-addressed.scm  
> /gnu/store/lpais26sjwxcyl7y7jqns6f5qrbrnb34-sed-4.8
> $ guix build -f /tmp/content-addressed.scm -S --check -v0
> /gnu/store/mgais6lk92mm8n5kyx70knr11jbwgfhr-sed-4.8.tar.gz
>
>
> Did you spot a problem?
>
> …
>
>
> So, what did we just build?
>
> $ ls $(guix build -f /tmp/content-addressed.scm)/bin
> egrep  fgrep  grep
>
>
> Oh oh!  This ‘sed’ package is giving us ‘grep’!  How come?
>
> The trick is easy: we give a URL that’s actually 404, with the hash of a
> file that can be found on Software Heritage (in this case, that of
> ‘grep-3.4.tar.xz’).  When downloading the source, the automatic
> content-addressed fallback kicks in, and voilà:
>
> $ guix build -f /tmp/content-addressed.scm  -S --check 
> La jena derivaĵo estos konstruata:
>/gnu/store/nq2jdzbv3nh9b1mglan54dcpfz4l7bli-sed-4.8.tar.gz.drv
> building /gnu/store/nq2jdzbv3nh9b1mglan54dcpfz4l7bli-sed-4.8.tar.gz.drv...
>
> Starting download of 
> /gnu/store/1mlpazwwa2mi35v7jab5552lm3ssvn6r-sed-4.8.tar.gz
>>From https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/zed/sed-4.8.tar.gz...
> following redirection to 
> `https://mirror.cyberbits.eu/gnu/zed/sed-4.8.tar.gz'...
> download failed "https://mirror.cyberbits.eu/gnu/zed/sed-4.8.tar.gz; 404 "Not 
> Found"
>
> [...]
>
> Starting download of 
> /gnu/store/1mlpazwwa2mi35v7jab5552lm3ssvn6r-sed-4.8.tar.gz
>>From 
>>https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/content/sha256:58e6751c41a7c25bfc6e9363a41786cff3ba5709cf11d5ad903cf7cce31cc3fb/raw/...
> downloading from 
> https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/content/sha256:58e6751c41a7c25bfc6e9363a41786cff3ba5709cf11d5ad903cf7cce31cc3fb/raw/
>  ...
>
> warning: rewriting hashes in 
> `/gnu/store/mgais6lk92mm8n5kyx70knr11jbwgfhr-sed-4.8.tar.gz'; cross fingers
> successfully built 
> /gnu/store/nq2jdzbv3nh9b1mglan54dcpfz4l7bli-sed-4.8.tar.gz.drv
>
>
> It’s nothing new, it’s what I do when I want to test the download
> fallbacks (see also ‘GUIX_DOWNLOAD_FALLBACK_TEST’ in commit
> c4a7aa82e25503133a1bd33148d17968c899a5f5).  Still, I wonder if it could
> somehow be abused to have malicious packages pass review.

Here's another way to think of it, borrowing from some ocap systems: the
hash is the actual, canonical identifier of this package revision.  The
URL to get the package is merely a "hint" as to where to get it.

Therefore, there can be many other "hints" as to where to get it too,
enabling mirrors to be elevated to the "same" priority as the original
source.

Re: Incentives for review

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Ricardo Wurmus  writes:

> Ludovic Courtès  writes:
>
>> A good middle ground may be to provide incentives for review. How?
>> I’m
>> not sure exactly, but first by making it clear that review is makes
>> the
>> project move forward and is invaluable.  You once proposed having
>> ‘Reviewed-By’ tags to acknowledge non-committer reviews, and I think
>> that would be one step in that direction.  Perhaps there are other
>> things we could do?
>
> I was thinking in the opposite direction: not incentives to recognize
> reviewers but a closer relationship to the patch submitters,
> i.e. “patch buddies” or mentorship.  If I made myself officially
> responsible for reviewing commits by Simon and all commits touching R
> then I’m more likely to actually do the review for these patches.

I think this sounds good.  Maybe in conjunction with "guix days", etc?

> Reviews done by people who are not committers could also be
> acknowledged, of course, but applying the patch (sometimes 
> manually because of conflicts) is still manual work that can feel like
> a chore if the committer doesn’t feel a connection to the patch or the
> person who submitted it.

Re: I just got my pinephone.

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

jbra...@dismail.de writes:

> October 1, 2021 6:56 PM, "Christine Lemmer-Webber"  
> wrote:
>
>> I think the easiest step to first testing would be to install Guix
>> (userspace package manager) from Debian on Mobian. I've been meaning to
>> do that, haven't tried yet...
>
> WeirdlyI'm not certain that I want guix on my pinephone.  Specifically 
> I got my Pinephone, because I was tired of google's spyware.  AND I wanted
> a life phone, which is a phone that is so boring to use, you put it down
> and go live a life instead.  :)
>
> I've actually installed Mobian, removed the user "mobian" from the 
> suoders list, and had my mom change the root password on my phone.  
> So, my phone by design does not have firefox or tootle installed...
>
> If I installed guix system, I could re-install those annoying apps 
> that drain my life away.  It would be nice if guix system could 
> create a user that is not allowed to install applications, or had
> only a whitelist of applications that he could install. 
>
> That's my two cents.  :)

Well I understand.  For years I've kept all the social stuff off my
phone to not be too sucked into it.  I use a browser, but in read-only
mode...!

>> 
>> from there we can look at what's necessary to go full distro
>> 
>> Kaelyn  writes:
>> 
>>> Hi Guix!
>>> 
>>> I just received my pinephone this morning, so I'm going to be
>>> interested in bringing Guix to the pinephone as well. I hope to have
>>> the capacity to help with the efforts, even if it's just the
>>> occasional testing.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Kaelyn
>>> 
>>> Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
>>> 
>>> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
>>> 
>>> On Wednesday, September 1st, 2021 at 12:39 PM, Joshua Branson 
>>>  wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hey Guix!
>>>> 
>>>> I just got my phinephone. It's currently running postmarketOS (1). I
>>>> 
>>>> usually work nights two nights a week 10pm-6am (EST) Sunday night and
>>>> 
>>>> Monday night. If a guix developer would like ssh access to it during
>>>> 
>>>> those times, then please let me know. If I should use Mobian instead
>>>> 
>>>> to help port guix to it, then I would be willing to switch.
>>>> 
>>>> I'd be happy to help out! Also jmp.chat (2) works really well with
>>>> 
>>>> chatty.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> 
>>>> Joshua
>>>> 
>>>> 1. https://postmarketos.org/source-code
>>>> 2. https://jmp.chat

Re: How did you handle making a GNU/Linux distribution?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Philip McGrath  writes:

> On 9/12/21 11:09 PM, Christine Lemmer-Webber wrote:
>> Philip McGrath  writes:
>>> Christine Lemmer-Webber had floated the idea at some point of trying
>>> to integrate Racket and Guile.
>>>
>>> IIRC, I think what she's had in mind was trying to make a Guile
>>> backend for Racket along the lines of the Chez Scheme backend (or the
>>> BC backend, or experimental backends like Pycket).
>> Yes that's what I had in mind :)
>
> A few stray thoughts, all with the caveat that I haven't actually
> tried any of this ...
>
>>> there are two things that have struck me
>>> as downsides:
>>>
>>>   1. Flatt et al. say in "Rebuilding Racket on Chez Scheme (Experience
>>>  Report)" (§6, p. 13) that, "If our task were to compile Racket to an
>>>  existing target, then we would not have achieved such a high degree
>>>  of compatibility. … we have taken the liberty of modifying Chez
>>>  Scheme to make it an easier target for Racket."
>>>
>>>  https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp19-fddkmstz.pdf
>>>
>>>  Presumably a Racket-on-Guile project would face the same trade-off,
>>>  where modifications to Guild, if Racket CS is a guide, could require
>>>  hard work over many years, and lesser compatibility would make the
>>>  result less useful.
>> At one point when I spoke to Matthew, he was very optimistic that
>> the
>> work on porting on top of Chez would open Racket to running on top of
>> many other backends.  But yes... since there have been so many "custom"
>> modifications to Chez, it's easier to be skeptical about that these
>> days...
>
> I think there a few possible senses for what "running on top of many
> other backends" could mean. My impression overall is that it has
> gotten easier, but may not necessarily be easy.
>
> The most clearly demonstrated is that it seems to be easier to port
> Chez Scheme to new architectures than to port Racket BC's VM. Racket
> CS supports the Apple M1 chip natively (and hopefully will support the 
> Linux kernel on the M1 when that stabilizes), which Racket BC does
> not. Racket CS also fully supports some platforms (ARM in general,
> IIRC) on which Racket BC lacks support for futures, places, or the
> JIT. The most promising route to Racket on WASM also seems to be
> adding a WASM backend to the Chez Scheme compiler. (In fairness, there
> are also some architectures, like ppc64le, to which no one has ported
> Racket CS yet, for which Racket BC can offer at least some support via
> C.)

Who will get to WASM first, Racket or Guile?  :)

> More generally, the "linklet" abstraction[1] seems to provide a much
> more clear boundary between the responsibilities of a backend 
> implementation and the common frontend than existed before Racket
> 7.0. For example, the backend doesn't have to deal with macro
> expansion or even shadowing of variables: it just need to have some
> way to instantiate linklets (likely with further backend-specific
> compilation) and to provide a whole bunch of primitives. I believe
> I've heard Sam Tobin-Hochstadt say that linklets have made it possible
> for Pycket (the experimental Racket implementation in Reticulated
> Python) to run most Racket code.
>
> [1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/linklets.html
>
> Another benefit of linklets is that they've defined a clear path for
> implementing parts of Racket in Racket itself, like the regexp 
> implementation on Racket CS. This seems like it could help a lot with
> supplying that very large number of primitives.
>
> So I expect it would be entirely possible to implement a linklet-based
> Racket backend in Guile. I do suspect that getting production-quality 
> performance and compatibility could be a lot of work. But my bigger
> concern is ...
>
>>>   2. As you probably know, Racket programs can't generally use
>>>  Chez Scheme implemented libraries, because Chez Scheme effectively
>>>  is the "unsafe" layer of the Racket VM. For example, not all Racket
>>>  procedures are Chez Scheme procedures, and Racket's continuations
>>>  wrap Chez Scheme's to implement delimited and composable control,
>>>  threads, parameters, full continuation marks, etc.
>>>
>>>  For Racket CS, this isn't a great loss (there aren't so many
>>>  Chez-specific libraries, and portable libraries can run in Racket's
>>>  R6RS language), but, for a hypothetical Racket-on-Guile,
>>>  bidirectional inter

Re: I just got my pinephone.

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

I think the easiest step to first testing would be to install Guix
(userspace package manager) from Debian on Mobian.  I've been meaning to
do that, haven't tried yet...

from there we can look at what's necessary to go full distro

Kaelyn  writes:

> Hi Guix!
>
> I just received my pinephone this morning, so I'm going to be
> interested in bringing Guix to the pinephone as well. I hope to have
> the capacity to help with the efforts, even if it's just the
> occasional testing.
>
> Cheers,
> Kaelyn
>
> Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
>
> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
>
> On Wednesday, September 1st, 2021 at 12:39 PM, Joshua Branson 
>  wrote:
>
>> Hey Guix!
>>
>> I just got my phinephone. It's currently running postmarketOS (1). I
>>
>> usually work nights two nights a week 10pm-6am (EST) Sunday night and
>>
>> Monday night. If a guix developer would like ssh access to it during
>>
>> those times, then please let me know. If I should use Mobian instead
>>
>> to help port guix to it, then I would be willing to switch.
>>
>> I'd be happy to help out! Also jmp.chat (2) works really well with
>>
>> chatty.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Joshua
>>
>> 1.  https://postmarketos.org/source-code/
>> 2.  https://jmp.chat

Re: Mailman packaging (was: Re: Python package naming: Dots vs hyphens)

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Efraim Flashner  writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 02:18:33PM +0100, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
>> Long e-mail / review follows.  Feel free to disagree.
>> 
>> On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 09:19:17AM +0200, Efraim Flashner wrote:
>> > On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 07:49:56AM +0100, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
>> > > I am in the process of packaging mailman 3 which according to the pypi
>> > > importer needs packages like
>> > > 
>> > > python-flufl.bounce
>> > > python-flufl.i18n
>> > > python-flufl.lock
>> > > python-lazr.config
>> > > python-lazr.delegates
>> > > python-zope.component
>> > > python-zope.configuration
>> > > python-zope.configuration
>> > > python-zope.event
>> > > python-zope.interface
>> > > 
>> > 
>> > I've actually last week started working on that. I've only done the
>> > python part, haven't searched for any javascript or font-awesome which
>> > I'm pretty sure I saw. I've also started working on a service for it
>> > which I haven't committed yet, but it looks like it's going to be
>> > complex.
>> > 
>> > https://gitlab.com/genenetwork/guix-bioinformatics/blob/master/gn/packages/mailman.scm
>> > 
>> 
>> Wow.  That is good.  You have the better setup and have packaged more
>> of the Mailman Suite so please continue with yours.  I too started
>> last week.  I have only looked at the python part of mailman core
>> myself.  Let me compare and complain about some of what I have done
>> differently.  Some things are clearly better your way. ;)  You have
>> come further.  I will watch your repo now and try and test other
>> mailman things tomorrow.

(A couple of years later...)

Has anyone worked on this or used it in recent times?  The above link no
longer works.  However I see:

  https://gitlab.com/genenetwork/guix-bioinformatics/-/tree/wip-mailman

... which hasn't seen activity for about a year, but seems promising?

Re: How did you handle making a GNU/Linux distribution?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Philip McGrath  writes:

> Hi Sage,
>
> On 8/22/21 5:53 PM, Sage Gerard wrote:
>> Thanks for the detailed answer!
>> It seems wise to adapt GNU Mes towards Racket or Chez Scheme instead
>> of
>> Guile to bring GNU's benefits to more Scheme and Racket programmers. Has
>> someone already tried something like that?
>
> I haven't tried Xiden yet, and I haven't done any concrete work toward
> this (I have been working on managing Racket packages with Guix), but 
> Christine Lemmer-Webber had floated the idea at some point of trying
> to integrate Racket and Guile.
>
> IIRC, I think what she's had in mind was trying to make a Guile
> backend for Racket along the lines of the Chez Scheme backend (or the
> BC backend, or experimental backends like Pycket).

Yes that's what I had in mind :)

> As I said, I haven't actually tried any of this, but, as I've thought
> about what might be involved, there are two things that have struck me 
> as downsides:
>
>  1. Flatt et al. say in "Rebuilding Racket on Chez Scheme (Experience
> Report)" (§6, p. 13) that, "If our task were to compile Racket to an
> existing target, then we would not have achieved such a high degree
> of compatibility. … we have taken the liberty of modifying Chez
> Scheme to make it an easier target for Racket."
>
> https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp19-fddkmstz.pdf
>
> Presumably a Racket-on-Guile project would face the same trade-off,
> where modifications to Guild, if Racket CS is a guide, could require
> hard work over many years, and lesser compatibility would make the
> result less useful.

At one point when I spoke to Matthew, he was very optimistic that the
work on porting on top of Chez would open Racket to running on top of
many other backends.  But yes... since there have been so many "custom"
modifications to Chez, it's easier to be skeptical about that these
days...

>  2. As you probably know, Racket programs can't generally use
> Chez Scheme implemented libraries, because Chez Scheme effectively
> is the "unsafe" layer of the Racket VM. For example, not all Racket
> procedures are Chez Scheme procedures, and Racket's continuations
> wrap Chez Scheme's to implement delimited and composable control,
> threads, parameters, full continuation marks, etc.
>
> For Racket CS, this isn't a great loss (there aren't so many
> Chez-specific libraries, and portable libraries can run in Racket's
> R6RS language), but, for a hypothetical Racket-on-Guile,
> bidirectional interoperability would be a big attraction: imagine
> Guix, Shepherd, Mcron, syntax/parse, racket/contract, and more all
> working together.
>
> If I were going to work on this, I'd start by looking at having Racket
> and Guile coexist as siblings with interoperability through their FFIs 
> level. Even better, eventually you could compile Guile to Racket
> linklets, so the two could coexist in the same primitive module
> system. There would probably always need to be something along the
> lines of require/typed to interoperate between the languages, since
> Guile has mutable pairs and an unusual approach to falsehood and
> nullity to let Scheme's #f and '() coexist with Emacs List's nil. (See 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Nil.html).
>
>>>> I'm at the point where users are requesting a GNU/Linux distribution for
>>>> Xiden, such that Racket is the primary language for day-to-day
>>>> operation. I'm ignorant of the scope of work, and am unsure if I can do
>>>> it alone.
>
> To me, at least, the scope of the work in creating a new GNU/Linux
> distribution seems daunting. My hope would be that bringing Racket and 
> Guile closer together would let most if not all of the effort be shared.
>
> Hope some of this is useful, and best of luck!
>
> -Philip

Re: I just got my pinephone.

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Joshua Branson  writes:

> Hey Guix!
>
> I just got my phinephone.

Horray!  Awesome!

> It's currently running postmarketOS (1).  I usually work nights two
> nights a week 10pm-6am (EST) Sunday night and Monday night.  If a guix
> developer would like ssh access to it during those times, then please
> let me know.  If I should use Mobian instead to help port guix to it,
> then I would be willing to switch.

I wonder how much harder it is to port the pine*.scm stuff over as a
"just get it to boot" first step.  It can't be too hard... can it?!

It looks like I'm being "forced" to switch over to my pinephone as my
primary phone anyway.  So maybe now's a good time to see if we can Guix
it up.

Guix on top of Mobian makes sense as a starting point to just make sure
packiages work though I suppose.  I do have Mobian running on mine so
maybe that's a great place to start.

What I'd really like: to use the Guix System Image API so I can do a
"just works" flash-to-sd-card.

> I'd be happy to help out!  Also jmp.chat (2) works really well with
> chatty.

Let's talk in #guix?!

> Thanks,
>
> Joshua
>
> 1) https://postmarketos.org/source-code/
>
> 2) https://jmp.chat

Re: wip-postfix

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Gábor Boskovits writes:

> Hello Jan,
>
>> I took the liberty of rebasing wip-postfix on latest master and
>> found it does not compile
>>
>> --8<---cut here---start->8---
>> gcc -fPIC -I. -I../../include -DNO_EAI -DDEF_SMTPUTF8_ENABLE=\"no\"
>> -DHAS_DEV_URANDOM
>> -DDEF_SHLIB_DIR=\"/gnu/store/hbdrbb84krvjvw58vmr1pvzb6l3gbmyv-postfix-minimal-3.4.8\"
>> -DUSE_DYNAMIC_LIBS -DUSE_DYNAMIC_MAPS -Wmissing-prototypes -Wformat
>> -Wno-comment -fPIC -g -O -I. -I../../include -DLINUX5 -c dns_str_resflags.c
>> dns_str_resflags.c:55:13: warning: RES_AAONLY is deprecated
>>  "RES_AAONLY", RES_AAONLY,
>>  ^
>> dns_str_resflags.c:57:13: warning: RES_PRIMARY is deprecated
>>  "RES_PRIMARY", RES_PRIMARY,
>>  ^~~
>> dns_str_resflags.c:63:22: error: ‘RES_INSECURE1’ undeclared here (not in a
>> function); did you mean ‘RES_RECURSE’?
>>  "RES_INSECURE1", RES_INSECURE1,
>>   ^
>>   RES_RECURSE
>> --8<---cut here---end--->8---
>>
>> Luckily, that was easily fixed by updating postfix to 3.5.0.
>>
>
> Thanks for having a look.
>
>>
>> >>  When I hack around and create /etc/ailases.db, it works.
>> > I would like to add a service config for this.
>>
>> I found we already have mail-aliases-service-type, so I used that,
>> together with running postalias.  Now, queuing mail works ootb...but
>> delivery seems not to work: it remains queued.
>>
>> I rebased wip-postfix and added a couple of patches for this.  Please
>> feel free to revert them if you don't like it :-)
>>
>> When starting postfix like so
>>
>> --8<---cut here---start->8---
>> ./pre-inst-env guix system vm gnu/system/examples/postfix.tmpl`\
>>--nographic -m 1G\
>>--nic
>> user,model=virtio-net-pci,hostfwd=tcp::12025-:25,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:12022
>> -:
>> --8<---cut here---end--->8---
>>
>> I'm seeing
>>
>> --8<---cut here---start->8---
>> 07:39:18 janneke@dundal:~/src/guix/wip-postfix [env]
>> $ telnet localhost 12025
>> Trying 127.0.0.1...
>> Connected to localhost.
>> Escape character is '^]'.
>> 220 komputilo.localdomain ESMTP Postfix
>> mail from: root
>> mail from: root
>> 250 2.1.0 Ok
>> rcpt to: alice
>> rcpt to: alice
>> 250 2.1.5 Ok
>> data
>> data
>> 354 End data with .
>> hello Alice!
>> hello Alice!
>> .
>> .
>> 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as E26BA3116
>> quit
>> quit
>> 221 2.0.0 Bye
>> Connection closed by foreign host.
>> 08:03:53 janneke@dundal:~/src/guix/wip-postfix [env]
>> $ ssh -p 12022 root@localhost
>> /gnu/store/mydn0wr0bs7mz3rx9fwihpma26r0dpqq-postfix-minimal-3.5.0/mailq -C
>> /gnu/store/nj5pa9l9zy6vx5484pbdsqnilva8bivc-postfix-config-dir
>> -Queue ID-  --Size-- Arrival Time -Sender/Recipient---
>> E26BA3116*  175 Mon Aug 10 08:00:50  root@komputilo.localdomain
>>  alice@komputilo.localdomain
>>
>> -- 0 Kbytes in 1 Request.
>> --8<---cut here---end--->8---
>>
>> Ideas?
>>
>
> I will have a look early next week. Most probably the setuid stuff is
> missing, and access is denied to something.

Good news, the new setuid stuff is in now in git master.

This probably means wip-postfix could be rebased on top of it again and
could take advantage of it?