Hi Ben,
I’ve seen some of your posts, and haven’t had any help to offer.
Your questions remind me of others I’ve seen, where someone gets
into the weeds of a problem and asks weedy questions, when they
should be asking big picture questions. I don’t know for if
that’s the case here, but it seems like a possibility. At the
very least, I’ve found that explaining how I got to the point of
having a specific question almost always gets better results. In
the many, many cases where I’ve been on the wrong path, this has
allowed people to suggest better approaches that I didn’t know
about, or hadn’t considered.
I’d also note that the last three weeks are typically a much
slower time of year for people in the US due to the holidays, and
that almost certainly means that you’ll get slower responses (if
any) for this type of thing.
— Ian
Ben Weinstein-Raun <r...@benwr.net> writes:
[[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
Hello!
I notice that I haven't been able to get much help with Guix,
via any
route. Having asked six or seven questions[^1] over the last
three weeks
(on this list, on the subreddit, and on the IRC channel), I've
received
help with only one of those problems (thanks nckx!). Ultimately
I've
cobbled together crappy solutions to my problems over that time,
but a
couple knowledgeable responses could have saved me dozens of
hours.
I'd love to wholeheartedly recommend Guix, because technically
speaking
I much prefer it to Nix, and to the "classic" alternatives. I'm
hugely
grateful that it exists! Of course it's nobody's responsibility
to
answer beginner questions! But at the moment, I'm going to need
to give
a big caveat with any recommendation: "The Guix documentation is
relatively high-quality, but if you want to understand anything
that
isn't explained there, you should expect to dive much deeper
than you
would with most tools, as it's quite hard to get any engagement
fr
om
people who know the answers to your questions."
One possibility is that there just aren't many people who know
those
answers. If that's true, then there's not much to be
done. Another is
that I've gone about this wrongly somehow, in which case I'd
love to
know how I could do better (in reply to this message is great,
though I
also have an anonymous feedback form you can use, if you want to
be
really ruthless :-) https://forms.gle/8fYoiNedq2g4UTPj8). And
another
possibility is that I've just been unlucky, either with timing,
or with
the particular questions I've wanted to ask.
Anyway, what, if anything, could I be doing better? I've read
and try to
follow the advice at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html,
but it's been a while and it occurs to me that I should refresh
myself.
What else?
Thanks for any meta-help!
[1]
-
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2023-12/msg00123.html
-
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2023-12/msg00160.html
-
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2023-12/msg00164.html
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/GUIX/comments/18mimv0/user_services_that_run_on_startup/
- https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2023-12-16.log#003630
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