Blog team

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

I’m really happy that over the last few months several people stepped up
to write articles for our blog at <https://gnu.org/s/guix/blog/> (look,
there’s a shiny new article there that’s worth reading!).

I always find it interesting to read about things that people do with
Guix or crazy experiments they start :-), and I think it’s useful info
for people who are just looking at Guix as it allows them to get a feel
of what it could do for them.

Anyway, I’ve just created a guix-***@gnu.org alias, which is currently
just Ricardo and myself. I’d like to encourage people who have a draft
for an article, and who’d like to discuss ideas for a future article to
post there (guix-devel is also fine, but sometimes you may want to not
disclose the article until it’s published.)

Likewise, people who’d like to be on this alias to review and comment on
articles (this should be a lightweight process), please let me know and
I’ll add you! The more people, the more efficient this can be.

Ludo’.

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Very nice initiative!

I'd be very happy to share some ideas on this blog, but I still have to
put my things together.

I recently had a fair discussion over Guix vs. NixOS vs. the world:

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8a94rt/helm_system_packages_update_guix_xbps_void_linux/

Lots of interesting points where raised I think.

One of the hottest topic that I'm tackling at the moment is the
management of non-opensource installs. This is relevant to gamers in
particular since the gaming industry is still wary of committing to the
open source development model, even among the more "open" actors (Steam,
GOG.com, Humble Bundle).

This is a far cry to the game devs: binaries are not sustainable,
reproducible builds are an ever pressing call for opensource releases.

Some points would include:

- Binary patching (RPATH and ld interpreter)
- The multilib hassle (32-bit on 64-bit systems)
- Static linking vs. dynamic linking.

Not completely sure that would fit a Guix blog entry though :p

--
Pierre Neidhardt

As a goatherd learns his trade by goat, so a writer learns his trade by wrote.

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Pierre,

Post by Pierre Neidhardt
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8a94rt/helm_system_packages_update_guix_xbps_void_linux/

Here’s another one for reference in response to the question “What are
the advantages of guix vs nix?”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16491797

Post by Pierre Neidhardt
One of the hottest topic that I'm tackling at the moment is the
management of non-opensource installs. […]
Not completely sure that would fit a Guix blog entry though :p

Yeah, I think this should not be published on the official project blog,
as non-free software really is out of scope for our project.

--
Ricardo

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Post by Pierre Neidhardt
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8a94rt/helm_system_packages_update_guix_xbps_void_linux/

Here’s another one for reference in response to the question “What are
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16491797

Great write up! And great post too :)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

I didn’t mention it but here are rough guidelines that I think we should
follow for blog posts:

• It should indeed be about free software and not promote non-free
software (it’s also a good idea to follow
<https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html> IMO.) So the
topic of patching non-free binaries wouldn’t fit the bill, for
instance.

• It should be understandable by someone who’s not a die-hard Guix
or Scheme hacker. :-) So it’s good to provide enough context,
possibly with links to relevant parts of the manual, previous blog
posts, etc.

• It’s good to use appropriate Markdown markup (ah ha!), like
backquotes for file names, command names, and so on, or “```scheme”
to introduce Scheme snippets. See <http://spec.commonmark.org/0.27/>.

Apart from that, anything that teaches people how to solve a problem or
that explains neat hacks in or with Guix(SD) is very welcome IMO!
Articles don’t have to be super long or take days to write; more
informal or short articles can be useful too.

Ludo’.