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Re: [GSoC] Draft proposal for an Install Wizard for Guix
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
Re: [GSoC] Draft proposal for an Install Wizard for Guix |
Date: |
Fri, 01 Apr 2016 14:09:40 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux) |
Thomas Ingram <address@hidden> skribis:
> On 03/26/2016 07:39 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Personally, I would like to view the “wizard” as a helper, and not as
>> something that hides everything and turns people into “end users.”
>>
>> I don’t know how this could translate in the design of the tool.
>> Perhaps showing the ‘operating-system’ declaration as you suggest is one
>> thing, and making it easy to view the section of the manual that
>> corresponds to a particular item, or to jump to the code that defines a
>> specific service (say), would be helpful too.
> Yes as much as it is an installer it should also be an
> introduction. Something that not only lets a user easily input their
> options but also shows them how their settings will be put into
> config.scm, I'm trying to come up with some clever ideas of how to do
> this in a graceful way.
Awesome.
> Basically I was thinking of doing that with an ncurses UI that shows
> the user their config.scm with some documentation and then walks users
> through changing each option. But maybe an emacs installer makes more
> sense as this is the type of interface emacs does very well.
>
> The reason I had avoided proposing an emacs installer previously is I
> worry about confusion from users who are unfamiliar with emacs and how
> to use it. Should we be concerned with that when so many of Guix's
> great features that can be accessed through emacs. Perhaps there could
> be a simple introduction to emacs in the installer as well? On the
> other hand if a user has no experience with emacs throwing that at
> them along with config.scm could be overwhelming.
I understand your concern.
I think that in this case, Emacs should be viewed as a UI toolkit: just
like someone using an ncurses program doesn’t have to learn the ncurses
API, someone using an Emacs-based UI doesn’t have to learn Emacs.
It just happens that Emacs is a full-featured UI toolkit, especially
when it comes to Guix things. For instance, it already has all we need
to display and navigate source code (from an ‘operating-system’
configuration, one can contextual documentation, jump to
procedure/variable definitions, etc.), to navigate packages, and so on.
Having said that, I think that if you’re more comfortable writing Guile
and ncurses code than Emacs code for this project, then that’s perfectly
fine, of course.
Thanks,
Ludo’.
- Re: [GSoC] Draft proposal for an Install Wizard for Guix,
Ludovic Courtès <=