Hello Guix! The recent ‘guix shell’ addition is almost anecdotal technically yet important for the project because users interact with Guix primarily through the CLI. Adding a new command is a commitment (our users must trust it won’t change overnight), and getting the details wrong could make us fail to honor that commitment.
For ‘guix shell’ I left time for comments and repeatedly asked people to comment; yet pushing it was a bit stressful: Did I make a mistake? Did everyone with a stake in this really have a chance to comment? That makes me think it’s perhaps time for a formalized request-for-comments (RFC) kind of process for such “major changes”. We could draw inspiration from one of the many existing processes: Python’s PEPs, Scheme’s SRFIs, Nix’s RFCs, Rust’s MCPs, etc. I think a major goal of the process would be to formalize a minimum and a maximum duration under which an RFC is under evaluation, and a mechanism to determine whether it’s accepted or withdrawn. Thoughts? Anyone with experience with such a process? Ludo’.
