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Meta Guix: why guix is awesome!
From: |
Joshua Branson |
Subject: |
Meta Guix: why guix is awesome! |
Date: |
Wed, 28 Apr 2021 13:20:36 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.1 (gnu/linux) |
Hello guix developers!
Guix is brilliantly fantastic! I thought I would write down some of the
things that make guix such a great community and a powerful free
software tool. I intend this email to encourage guix developers and
perhaps encourage other free software projects to copy guix's success.
1. It encourages non-english speaking participation. Guix's manual is
a work of art that has been translated into a few languages:
German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese? Honestly my font in
my browser can't read the last translation...but I think it's
Mandorin (spelling?) Anyway, guix has a strong push to NOT be an
American only project. It also has some email lists for
non-english speakers. That is awesome! I had never thought about
non-English mailing lists, but there certainly are non-english
speakers that would love to get help. Also the website is
available many languages.
2. Guix's leadership is non-political. I recall on the mailing list
an issue raised about freedom of speech concerns. Many emotion
emails went back and forth over this issue with guix developers
expressing a variety of opinions. I actually felt encouraged that
Ludo did NOT say anything in this email exchange. That signaled to
me that Ludo doesn't care what your political views are. Anyone
and everyone is free to contribute to guix regardless of what you
believe!
3. It has great marketing. I think this really ought to be stressed a
lot! Guix has numerous blog posts that demonstrate that the
project is alive. And they are really well written. And engaging!
I absolutely love guix's blog! And the website is hip! And it's
got great artwork!
4. Some people work full time on guix (and get paid). There are a
few guix developers who develop A LOT for guix. I think the main
source of income for several prominent guix developers is from
cluster deployments as seen here: https://hpc.guix.info/about/ Also
some developers get grants to work for guix as well. This is a
personal view, but I do believe that free software ought to somehow
pay some developers. That's how they can continue to develop the
software.
5. Guix's leadership lets the best idea win. I personally think
Ludo's last line on his email is genius: "Thoughts?". It's a great
idea to solicit feedback, and I believe that Ludo genuinely wants
your thought and opinions.
6. Guix has big goals! What is org-mode? Emacs? Guix? The
GNU/Hurd? All of these projects are sometimes hard to define.
There are so many things that you can do with guix! Declarable
operating system. Bootstrapped distro. Portable distro. Server
manager. Soon maybe a guix home manager. This maybe violates the
unix philosophy of small programs that do things well, but perhaps
because guix dreams big it can dare crazy things!
7. Guix is NOT linux development! Guix encourages newbie developers
by sometimes fixing their really AWFUL code (or documentation).
AND NOT being angry at those trivial errors. For example, some of
my documentation "fixes" were me pointing out an tiny issue with
the manual. Then I sent a diff that didn't work. And someone else
submitted a patch on my behalf that did my suggestion. It's nice
to know that you won't be needlessly insulted while contributing to
guix. A great example of this can be found in the irc log. I
recall one such instance of a newbie asking about a silly
bug/feature. In a moment of frustration I thought about saying
something rude (I did not say it). Ludo actually responded to the
question with something like, "That's a great point. Why don't you
open a bug report here, so that we can properly discuss it?" That
was very kind/smart!
Thoughts?
Joshua
P.S. If this email is not really suited here, please let me know. I
know I've sent a few emails to guix devel that may not have been
suitable. Please let me know if that is the case. :)
--
Joshua Branson (joshuaBPMan in #guix)
Sent from Emacs and Gnus
https://gnucode.me
https://video.hardlimit.com/accounts/joshua_branson/video-channels
https://propernaming.org
"You can have whatever you want, as long as you help
enough other people get what they want." - Zig Ziglar
- Meta Guix: why guix is awesome!,
Joshua Branson <=