Re: how to write services (was: Re: Teams)

[catonano]

Il giorno mer, 15/06/2022 alle 17.01 +0000, Blake Shaw ha scritto:
> 
> Catonano:
> I think writing a home-service is much easier given that you don't
> need to do produce an entire system generation before you find out
> what you did wrong; 

I suspected something like this

This is why I hypotized that a gradual passage with a Home service
could be convenient

Ricardo, the general map of the concepts involved in conceiving a
service is useful

But in my toot I asked for something different

I asked for indications about the process (what magic to use in the
REPL)

if you prefer, I asked for something more menial

Which buttons do I have to push (metaforically) ?

As for the semantics involved in thinking a service, I feel I can work
them out myself (to some extent)

This should be covered in the cookbook

I see there's a package for Tryton (that's a relative of Odoo) and the
package definition for Tryton is quite sought after

In fact Tryton modules are not python modules and there's a patch
modifying how Tryton retrieves its modules in Guix

Yet there's no service for Tryton

I asked Hartmut (I remembered they were involved in this) and they
declared their surrender in writing services
(Here https://nerdculture.de/@kirschwipfel/108477739857485544 )

Maybe there's some cognitive friction about how to produce services ?

This reminds me of an argument about Haskell I read

Some "expert" haskellers are deeply involved in "plug ins" to the
compiler that actually change the language and many haskellers with a
lower level of proficiency are confused by this

And this hampers the Haskell field as a whole

Too bad I can't provide a pointer to this

My point being that I think this is a case of curse of knowledge
(mentioned here https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/learning-a-language/ )

I think the friction on how to write a service is not in the semantics
involved

It's more menial

As an blueprint for what I mean, you can think of Smalltalk, the
programming language

There a famous implementation of Smalltalk called Squeak

I played with Squeak myself, many years ago

That's how I learned object orientation ,really

The experience Squeak offers is NOT Posix based (thank God)

A GNU implementation of Smalltalk also exists and it's totally Posix
based (because of the unfortunate "GNU System" delusion)

Do you think the GNU Smalltalk would have been as effective in teaching
me object orientation ?

I honestly doubt it

yet the language is exactly the same

because the problem is not the language, that is something people CAN
work out themselves (roughly)

The problem is the experience

As I'm writing this, I noticed someone replied to my toot
(here
https://tines.spork.org/objects/a2ff7376-c9a2-4bbd-9307-a5374571edb4 )

as you can see, they also noticed a difference in the experience
between creating home services and system services

While you somewhat downplayed that

Now I want to be clear, here

In the past I have misunderstood some of your contributions about
macros in Guile (that I had asked about)

I came to terms with the fact that you're doing your best and in total
good faith, so I hope it's clear that's not what's happening today

But I also hope you can see why I could get a bit frustrated with your
reply

Guix is being successful, these days but that's an exception in the
free software world and more so in the GNU world

Guile is less exceptional in that it's suffering from its marginality
and it has been doing so for several years now

and I believe these cultural issues are part of why and they are
threatening the whole user freedom movement

Sorry if I went off on a tangent, I just feel a bit about this

> it just depends on if you need your service initialized at startup
> (system-services, globally defined and available prior to login)
> rather than at login (home-services, per-user/locally defined).
> 
> I'm not on Mastodon but feel free to send your service my way for
> some help, I'm still a beginner but a second pair of eyes is always
> nice to have.

That's very kind of you, thank you

I don't know if I'll ever attempt to write a service for Odoo

Or for Tryton

I have a job now (and it has to do with Odoo), I also train in a gym, I
like to spend the free time I have on the beach (as it's evident from
my presence on the fediverse)  so I don't know it's not like I have any
slots to assign to attempt this

It's just that if the _process_ to write a service (home or system) was
made explicit, I could have played with it in the few moments of grace