Re: Reviving Emacs-Guix

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

>> I believe it suffers from 2 main issues:
>>
>> - Geiser is a strong dependency: everything depends from a well-working
>>   Geiser REPL.
>
> That’s a feature!

That'd be true if Geiser would indeed help us with Guix.  But here it
actually provides almost no benefits and costs us a lot.

Indeed, the *Guix REPL* buffer

- is not required to build packages,
- does not work to build packages because Geiser chokes on it,
- cannot interrupt some operations 
(https://gitlab.com/emacs-geiser/geiser/-/issues/11).

The benefits are few as I've experienced them:

- Traces are not interactive, which makes them not so useful:
  https://gitlab.com/emacs-geiser/geiser/-/issues/10

- Guix traces are hard to read anyways (I guess this is mostly due to
  our client / daemon architecture).

> Not a problem if Emacs-Guix were maintained, IMO.  We can talk to each
> other, jao (the Geiser maintainer and primary developer) has always been
> responsive and helpful.

True, the maintainer is responsive, sadly the issues I'm talking about
are hard to solve I think, they've been left hanging for a while now:

- https://gitlab.com/emacs-geiser/geiser/-/issues/9
- https://gitlab.com/emacs-geiser/geiser/-/issues/11

Unless someone wants to roll up their sleeves and fix these, Geiser will
remain a deal-breaker for Emacs-Guix.



I'd like insist: in the current state of Geiser, we cannot leverage it
reliably in Emacs-Guix.  We need to talk to Guix directly, e.g. with
`guix repl` like I've done in Nyxt.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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