Re: Communication and Design at Guix

[L p R n d n]

Hi,

swedebugia <address@hidden> writes:

> "Ludovic Courtès" <address@hidden> skrev: (8 januari 2019 18:37:53 CET)
>>Hello,
>>
>>L  p R n  d n    <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> After taking some time learning Guix and trying to get some new
>>packages
>>> in, I wanted get involved in a slightly different way. I'm not good
>>at
>>> programming and I think my time might be better used participating in
>>> tasks a little more inline with my skills.
>>> The thing is that I find "design" and "communication" (take it in a
>>very broad
>>> way) often a little more complex and delicate to tackle in a group
>>> project. This is why I'm introducing the idea with this mail.
>>
>>This is one of the non-programming activities where Guix needs help so
>>I’m glad you’re offering to contribute!
>>
>>> I think the Guix project could benefit a lot from dealing with the
>>> "rest of the world" and how it wants to show itself. It might even
>>help
>>> clarify some technical decisions if needed. Bonus is that next
>>release
>>> will probably be 1.0 and that it means Guix will get extra attention.
>>>
>>> I have a few things I would like to talk about but, as I don't want
>>to
>>> force aniything on anyone, I wanted to first have your thoughts about
>>this and
>>> eventually what you guix people think would be nice to tackle on. (I
>>> think I saw something about a wiki somewhere for example etc.)
>>
>>I’m not sure we need a wiki.  :-)
>>
>>A very concrete task that could be of interest to you is the “name
>>change” (a bit of a strong word) that we’d like to implement by 1.0.
>>I’ll try to summarize.  Currently we have “Guix” and “GuixSD”, and that
>>confuses things: people visit the web site, they see a “GuixSD” logo
>>and
>>get confused because they were just looking for a package manager, not
>>a
>>whole distro, or they think “GuixSD” is a storage device ;-), things
>>like that.
>>
>>The idea is to bring everything under the “Guix” name.  Most of the
>>time, writing “Guix” is good enough—after all, one can run ‘guix
>>system’
>>on a foreign distro, too.  When we really need to make the distinction,
>>for instance in the manual, we would write “Guix System” to designate
>>what we currently call “GuixSD”.
>>
>>This has implications mostly on the web site and on the manual. 
>>Ricardo
>>sketched web site modifications here:
>>
>>  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-01/msg00300.html
>>
>>It would probably have further implications on how we present
>>Guix/GuixSD.
>>
>>WDYT?
>>
>>> By the way, I wanted to start working on the documentation. 
>>> IMHO, it might benefit from a little graphical enhancement for
>>> newcomers. The thing is that it's currently hosted on
>>> gnu.org so it's probably not possible to modify the design. So I
>>wanted
>>> to ask, first, if that's something that would be welcome? What could
>>be
>>> the possibilities? And what would be the technical limitations?
>>
>>The HTML pages at gnu.org/s/guix/manual are generated from Texinfo. 
>>The
>>CSS there is shared with all the GNU manuals, which is nice for
>>consistency.  Ideally modifications of the CSS would be submitted to
>>the
>>GNU webmaster or address@hidden (I forgot which one).  However, be
>>aware that you may encounter misplaced conservatism if you take that
>>route, so don’t lose your hair on it.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Ludo’.
>
> What about guix.info? We can do whatever we want there I suppose and just link
> to it from the gnu site.
>
> Talking about CSS and the manual I would like to add patens highlighting.
> The chicken documentation has this (on mouse over) and it is really nice to be
> able to see how complicated expressions are composed.
>
> Also it would be really nice with a guix style guide apart from the manual 
> and a
> script to go through the code and autodocument from all the docstrings.
> (In the repl ,apropos can do a little something like this) I got this idea 
> from
> php reading the code of dolibarr.
> I'm mentioning this because it is important to know what procedures are where 
> in
> our code for new contributors.

I agree with that too. It could boost how quickly a dev is able to hack
on Guix. Getting faster to the fun part.

Have a nice day,

Lprndn