Re: package manager guix on Windows and OSX

[jbranso]

June 25, 2021 7:18 PM, indieterminacy@libre.brussels wrote:

> I love Latex, Context, I feel a bit weird for not having dabbled with 
> Texinfo. Im not sure Texinfo
> is going to sway enough younger programmers (Im neither young nor old), I 
> fear too many have been
> malconditioned into accepting delible communication techniques - Texinfo may 
> no longer cut it.

We all owe Ludo a big thanks for writing Skribilo.
 
> I would consider Org mode to probably be the most acceptable default, though 
> in many respects
> Skribilo could be more of a purer expression of a complete Guix approach. Are 
> the aforementioned
> all different ways of dissuading people from considering Guix or documenting 
> for it?

My understanding is that GNU Guix is a GNU project.  As such we abide by the 
GNU coding standards,
which means that our documentation standard is GNU Texinfo.  It was suggested 
to Stallman a while
ago that we should make the documentation standard Org mode, but Stallman did 
not like to force
people to use Emacs to write GNU documentation.  I would love to re-implement 
Org mode in GNU Guile,
but that would probably be several years worth of effort.  :)  Or perhaps not.  
I could just write
a reader in Skribilo!
 
> FYI, I have been wading into the Gemini protocol the last two months. Beyond 
> its more noticable
> security and publishing advantages, I have been entranced by the terseness of 
> its Gem .gmi
> (minimalist MarkDown) format. I consider it has crossover appeal (as least 
> between documenting
> power users across OSes). FYI, the OpenBSD crowd seem to have the lead in the 
> Gemini space - but
> this is presumable for the protocol rather than the markdown.

I tend to agree.  Drew Devault likes it a lot.  I'm hoping to set up my blog to 
be hosted via gemini
too.
 
> Since then I stopped annotating in Orgmode and will be building workflows to 
> (eventually?)
> approximate a lot of Orgmode functionality. Obviously Orgmode is awesome but 
> I wonder if it is too
> designed around individual workflows and procedures - where greater payoff 
> comes from pooled
> workflows and procedures.
> 
> I had success/pleaseure converting from .gem to .org formats with this 
> experimentation (concerning
> annotations for a Guix CWL blog post)
> => https://git.sr.ht/~indieterminacy/q1q20hqh_kq_oq_parsing_gem_zsh/tree
> 
> From the tree you can see that it is feasible to output to *tex* or *html* 
> formats, using simple
> REGEX foo.
> 
> Additionally there is an unfinished attempt at exporting to (sic) Skribilo.
> 
> (You may want to ignore the potentially impenitrable annotations, which 
> concerns a 'Recursive
> Modelling Language' Ive been working on - it would certainly confuse this 
> topic)

That sounds fun!  Chat to me off list if you care to explain it.

> I would be happy if Guix writing was done with minimal Gem markup but with 
> heavy Lisp usage for
> interpretation, synthesis, collection and publishing of content. I had 
> originally taken the
> approach that there should be Tex heavy markup first and then simplified 
> transposing into other
> formats later. Now Im on the other end of the horseshoe.
> 
> I miss experimenting with regards to Tikz as a mechanism for generating 
> graphics. I understand why
> other tools are used and ho programmers tend to seemingly think in terms of 
> characters. It bothers
> me that I do not have beautiful graph displays representing my environment - 
> to consider things
> from an impressionistic viewpoint and a contrast to text-editor/browser 
> dualism. I suspect it isnt
> insurmountable and could allow visually minded people to not feel aggrieved 
> by TUIscapes.
> 
>> What do you mean by:
>> 
>>> empathise regarding why networking engineers may prefer having a licence
>>> which permits encapsulation more readily.
> 
> I mean: the MIT license allows you to operate in a commercial setting, 
> whereby only the binaries
> are provided, without the requirement to provide the source content. While I 
> normally am against
> this, an OpenBSD networking head has explained to me how there would be 
> usecases where this would
> be useful - if only to provide the commercial breathing space for niche 
> projects. I probably should
> stop paraphrasing this person now.

I suppose that's fair.

> Jonathan McHugh
> indieterminacy@libre.brussels