Notices by Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr), page 6

With all its benefits over C/C++ in terms of memory safety, Rust still depends on itself to be built*, and Rust’s packaging approach is a nightmare for distros of a magnitude close to that of npm.

* This can be worked around but it doesn’t come for free: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/

The more I see Rust spread, but more I think there’s room for an alternate computing vision, one that doesn’t give up on managing complexity, that improves security and safety, but also supports hackability by the non-professionals.

Linux/Rust vs. Hurd/Guile?

@dthompson Yeah, I can sympathize. Ultimately, a project this size needs to have agreed-upon rules so developers and users know what to expect. As more people depend on Guix, I can understand how we end up moving towards more safety/conservatism; probably a necessary evil.

@graywolf

Once upon a time ‘ls -l’ (GNU Coreutils) would display dangling symlinks as red but it no longer does?

Incidentally, two things are worth noting here IMO:

1. It’s great to send a heads-up before actually stepping down, with a list of projects up for grabs—as opposed to simply disappearing as is all too common. That’s a much appreciated sign of commitment and humanity.

2. It’s OK to retire or take a break in free software, we all do eventually; no volunteer should work 365 days a year until they experience burnout.

Fellow hacker Ricardo Wurmus takes a break, maybe that’s an opportunity for you to help #Guix?
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-05/msg00227.html

If you’d like to give a hand on #CRAN and #Bioconductor packaging, on mentoring, #Python packaging, or Cuirass CSS+JS, get in touch with Ricardo!

“Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow Questions”
https://arxiv.org/html/2308.02312v4

More evidence that ChatGPT & co. are, indeed, mansplaining-as-a-service—in addition to being a resource drain.

Depuis 1999 on doit se faire recenser à ses 16 ans par le ministère des armées.
https://archives.defense.gouv.fr/jdc/parcours-citoyennete/recensement.html

Tout ça pour aller à la Journée Défense et Citoyenneté (JDC), recevoir « enseignements sur les enjeux et objectifs généraux de la défense nationale, et sur les différentes formes d'engagement ».
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F871

Une tribune appelle à permettre la déclaration d’objecteur·euse de conscience à la JDC :
https://www.humanite.fr/en-debat/armee-francaise/objecteur-de-conscience-a-la-journee-defense-et-citoyennete-cest-possible

Ce serait bien, de démilitariser.

Call for contributions to the #Guix infrastructure 👇
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-05/msg00183.html

Many areas where you can help, with different time commitments and prerequisites: funding & spending, hardware hosting, system administration, and coding.

#Guix services and web sites are back, except qa.guix.gnu.org and packages.guix.gnu.org.

To be continued…

Public Service Announcement: Several #Guix web sites and services are currently down.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-guix/2024-05/msg00000.html

✨ Log rotation service for the 🐑 #Shepherd:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-05/msg00159.html

Like in the early Unix of the 70’s, but with 2024 vibes! (And parens!)

@ekaitz_zarraga @stikonas Yay, congrats!

Maybe I missed an episode, but why bring another libc into the mix?

@ekaitz_zarraga I see, thanks for explaining!

I think it’s great that you found a solution that works. For Guix at least, we also need to look at the bigger picture and see how to best address it with a whole-system approach.

To me that probably means tweaking Meslibc (which, of course, is easier said than done).

@stikonas @janneke

I realize that for years, it’s been hard for me to answer questions like “what are you working on these days?”.

I feel like a large part of my day-to-day activity has been responding to stimuli: patches, support requests from work, emergency community/technical/infra support, conferences, meetings, the occasional academic paper, etc.

There’s still a long-term theme (several, even), but my everyday activity is largely chaotic.

Glad to be joining the fine #Guix London Meetup crowd led by @futurile and @fabionatali for a discussion about Guix, Guile, and life at 7PM CEST today!
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/PatchReviewSessions2024

Of course I’m joining remotely, but from a place that’s at least as rainy as London. ☔

Third-party channels bring tens of thousands more packages.

For scientific usage: https://hpc.guix.info/channels
General purpose: https://toys.whereis.xn--q9jyb4c/channels

How much should the package collection in Guix proper grow, though?

There are consistency, QA, and sustainability challenges.

@shtwzrd @daviwil Indeed, it’s really tricky: now that core packages like librsvg (and soon Linux) depend on Rust, you can’t just move Rust packages out of Guix.

The same goes for most language packages. For example, Pandoc is used by a variety of packages, and it pulls in lots of Haskell packages.

CRAN and Bioconductor might be good candidates, but then the difficult part would be dealing with compatibility and ensuring interested parties have a say.