Re: Guix days guix home discussion

[Ryan Prior]

On Sunday, March 17th, 2024 at 12:24 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> I personally try to lower the barrier for Home services, but I think few
> people (if any) beyond me review Home services.
> 
> We should expand the ‘home’ team; who’s in?

I would like to contribute to Guix home, but haven't been able to get much use 
out of it myself. This is a combination of two frustrations I've hit:

1. I haven't been able to use Guix Home to migrate my home config across 
machines. I've done this 3 times since I started using Guix on what I would 
consider advanced-level (writing Guile, defining my own packages & manifests, 
contributing patches.) Each time, I've got frustrated with the applicability of 
what documentation or examples I could find, and ended up migrating the bad old 
way by copying config files & modifying them as needed. Guix does help me in 
these migrations somewhat by allowing me to install needed software 
environments in a non-disruptive way, but I haven't gotten any use out of Home 
here. For reference, my attempts have been on elementary OS and Ubuntu, never 
on Guix System.

2. I've desired to use Guix Home on foreign distros to run Guix services (like 
Docker or Postgres) via Shepherd, but have failed to do so thus far. I read 
documentation in Guix and Shepherd, and some source code. I've got Shepherd 
installed & running on some of my machines, but I can't figure out how to use 
it to run Guix services. Possibly I'm missing something, but I also wonder 
whether perhaps Guix services are only intended to run on Guix System?

I would like to help make Guix Home & services have an excellent experience on 
foreign distros. I intend to write documentation, blog posts and code to do so. 
I've been stuck, though, in actually making progress understanding how to 
accomplish my aims, and every time I've tried it so far I've been in enough of 
a hurry that I gave up after a couple days' hacking. If anybody wants to pair 
with me or lend a hand I'd be thrilled to get back to this.

Ryan