Re: "System Package" vs "System Service"

[Raghav Gururajan]

Thank you very much for your clear explanation. I did add Tor Service
with Default Configuration to my system config; ans also added the user
to Tor group. But it seems that the traffic is not routed when I
checked with "check.torproject.org". What should I do?
On Sun, 2019-04-28 at 18:41 +0200, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> 
> Error verifying signature: Failed to execute gpg.
> Hi,
> On Sun, 28 Apr 2019 11:59:59 -0400Raghav Gururajan <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> I have this confusion/doubt. What is the difference between
> declaringsomething as "System Package" vs "System Service" in the
> Guix SystemConfiguration?
> A package is a thing that is present in your system and just stays
> put,similar to a chair or any other passive object.  If you want, you
> canmove the chair yourself or whatever, but it won't do things for
> youexcept incidentially.
> A service is an active process that, if you ask it to, will do work
> for youin order to reach a long-term goal.  The level of detail you
> have to specifywhen requesting the service is usually very low
> compared to what work willactually be carried out.For example a
> hairdressing service provides you the service of cuttingyour hair to
> a fashionable style.
> A chair and a hairdressing service are fundamentally different.
> Tor usually provides a proxy service (at port 9050) which will proxy
> allyour network traffic through it, with the goal of improving your
> privacy.
> It's difficult to see what you need the tor package to be installed
> for--because the service will already provide the proxying.  If you
> wanttor admin tools, you can of course install those (probably as
> userpackages).
> For reference, I have ten system packages in addition to %base-
> packages(there are 40 in the latter currently) and I'm a heavy guix
> user.If anything, I expect both counts to decrease over time.