Repairing this project seems like a really interesting way to go:
Not just configurable in Guile, but interactable in it all the time! The link on the page appears to be out-of-date: a fairly active version of guile-scsh lives here:
http://gitorious.org/guile-scsh, though from the contributors to that project it seems like at least some of the mailing list is already pretty aware of it! Even if we were to consider the command-line interaction expendable, it seems useful beyond measure to include functionality to run shell scripts in Guile. The operating system starts to look more like a library than an environment, and the user would feel like they were in Guile mode as soon as they boot up. What a joy!
Of course, the goal "get Guix bootable and running primarily Guile Scheme programs" is a pretty big goal, and fairly imprecise. I'd consider getting the WM packaged a secondary goal to getting a Guile shell running, so a project might be simply be "get Guix bootable and run ls through the guile-scsh" or some such a thing. Any feedback or ideas? My biggest barrier is not really knowing how much work needs to be done, or how much I could expect to get done in a summer. It seems that working 40 hours a week for three months would probably empower a body to do a fair amount. I don't really understand how an operating system becomes bootable, so I'd need some guidance on what exactly needs to be done to get that happening - that is, what exactly is the nature of the gulf between, say, boot-to-Guile, and Guix becoming a bootable distro? I don't know where to plug it all together, so to speak! I am certainly more than willing to learn; just explaining that this is all new to me. As you may have guessed, it is not my OS hacking skillz that interest me in the project, but my desire to see functional programming get used in practical software. I'm willing to learn just about anything to contribute to that goal :)
Broadly though, it seems like the order of business would be boot-to-Guile + Guix → dmd → Guile-scsh → nwm. Obviously those chunks are discrete, and you could chop them off at any point and still be better off than you were before. I could also see an argument for reversing the order of Guile-schsh and nwm, but as an arch user I always think of shells before window managers :D
My ideal project result would be a bootable distro that I can configure and interact with in Guile Scheme. If it had a wm, that'd be the icing on the cake (as wms always are! :P). Thoughts?
Thanks so much!