---- On Mon, 06 Nov 2023 23:43:07 +0100 Samuel Christie wrote --- > > Hello Matt; sorry, I've been distracted and almost missed your reply a few > weeks ago.
Not a problem! I've been distracted, too. :) > Any thoughts on process? Maybe we could have a repo managed the same way > Guix is, so I can learn that at the same time. (That is, emails for > discussion and patches to the tutorial) How hard would that be to get or set > up? A central repo makes sense. I'm open to exchanging patches over email rather than doing PRs. If it's okay with the Guix mailing list, I would be happy to have that exchange here so that others may observe, comment, and contribute. I've set up a repo here: https://codeberg.org/excalamus/guix-packaging-tutorial/src/branch/master/guix-packaging-tutorial.org > After that, I think the first step is picking an easy but non-trivial > package to do. Maybe it should be one that's already been packaged... I went > through a list of packages that I wished Guix had, and sadly none of them > were easy enough for me to do. My first choice was INN (a Usenet server), > but it has multiple service dependencies I wasn't sure how to handle. My > other choices were apparently in Rust, which always has waaay too many deps. > We could also do a better Hello tutorial. Thoughts? I think we should do a more detailed Hello tutorial. It is already referenced in the cookbook, it's non-trivial, and this is the use case it was created for. The package definition already exists (gnu/packages/base.scm). Some words on the document: I'd like to see the finished tutorial included in the cookbook. For that, it needs to be written in Texinfo. It's currently in Org. That's simply what I'm most familiar with and the format my notes were in. Org exports to Texinfo and info. While I'm sure the conversion is imprecise, sticking with Org allows me (at least) to write more easily. It's familiar and generates an (approximate) info file. My intent is to focus on explaining the topic and worry about the details of Texinfo later. Otherwise, Org provides a practical benefit: it embeds "live" source blocks. We can run all our shell calls from the document. My hope is that this will keep the source code and shell call snippets accurate. For anyone unfamiliar with Org, I've heavily annotated the document with explanations about how to navigate, edit, and transform it to other formats. If that's too much, that's okay. Just edit the text and we can take care of any markup syntax later. I'm excited to work on this with you and anyone else. I'm curious what your thoughts are :)
