Re: Guix Front End (GUI) and making it more mainstream, popular in scientific community.

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 at 21:55, Aniket Patil <aniket112.patil@gmail.com> wrote:

> P.S: I don't know whether GUI for Guix exists or not, to my knowledge it
> doesn't. If I am mistaken please enlighten me on this topic.

For sure, a GUI front-end will be nice.  Today, the most GUI-like is
provided by the package ’emacs-guix’, and as the name indicates, it
uses… Emacs.  Well for the worst and the better. :-)

Recently, we discussed with Pierre and Mathieu about this.  And even if
some GTK front-end would be nice to have, from my point of view, the
good direction would be a “web-app frontend”, similarly to
git-annex-assistant [1].  This design is more flexible because it could
be used locally *and* could also be the front-end of some servers (e.g.,
build farms).

For example, let imagine that one user is running Guix on their own
machine and they locally generates a Docker image (guix pack -f docker)
via the front-end.  Another user who does not run Guix on their own
machine (but instead some Apple product), they could go to the front-end
served by one shared machine and so click, generates the Docker image
and get back one link usable by “docker pull“ or whatever.

The same code could run the 2 use cases.  Well, command by command,
these are sharable between the 2 use cases: describe, search, show,
time-machine, weather, part of system and package and pack; at least for
a start.

1: <https://git-annex.branchable.com/videos/git-annex_assistant_lan/>


Just my opinion if I would be starting a GUI front-end. :-)

All the best,
simon