[bug#47238] [PATCH] services: mcron: Export procedures for shepherd service

[Xinglu Chen]

On Sun, Mar 28 2021, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> I’m often reluctant to exposing more than what’s strictly necessary
> because that can then complicate maintenance work—we now have to extra
> bindings to maintain.

Yeah, that's understandable.

> In this case, it’s definitely not the end of the world, but I wonder if
> there are other ways we could achieve what you have in mind.  For
> instance, could Guix Home reuse ‘mcron-seevice-type’ as is?

Right now all the service names are prefixed 'home-' to avoid name
clashes, though, maybe this could be changed in the future.  For now I
have just copied the definition of the procedures to Guix Home.

> Or, with an eye on getting Guix Home into Guix proper, are there some
> minimal changes we could make to accommodate that?

We are currently mostly focused on implementing some basic services
(e.g. Bash, GnuPG, Git).  After that we will probably invite some
volunteers to test it on their machines to get some more feedback.  Once
the basic services have been implemented and the documentation is
complete I think it would be appropriate to discuss merging Guix
Home to Guix proper, and probably refactor some stuff.

> (I have yet to play with Guix Home and to look at the implementation…)

There is a quickstart guide[1] on getting it up and running and we also
have a mailing list if you want to discuss things[2].  Andrew recently
made a video on the progress so far, and he touched a little on the
plan for the upcomming weeks/months.

Happy to see more people interested in Guix Home!

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/gnu/README
[2]: https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel
[3]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZaXHtSKKoeg