Ludovic Courtès / is on Nostr

GNU, Guix, Guile, reproducible research, etc.

Last Notes

2024-05-24 14:16:26

Call for contributions to the #Guix infrastructure 👇
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-05/msg00183.html
Many areas where you can help, with different time commitments and prerequisites: funding & spending, hardware hosting, system administration, and coding.

2024-04-17 13:10:34

Good news for declarative config fans: finally there’s a #Guix System service to deploy home environments!
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Guix-Services.html#Guix-Home-Service
Thanks to Richard Sent for implementing it, based on code by @npub1zgl…rqd7.

2024-03-24 21:34:32

My friends, I made a terrific (terrible?) discovery that goes by the name ‘sdlpop’:
https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/sdlpop/1.22/
I spent hours on this as a kid and it was great, even though I’m not sure I ever went past level 2 (I didn’t today).

2024-03-15 13:55:14

“We don’t want #reproducibility because we’ll get a badge.
We want reproducibility because being sure of what we run makes us more productive.”
Anne Fouilloux on #ReproducibleResearch at ORAP Forum.

2024-03-15 08:00:02

En route pour le Forum ORAP sur la #reproductiblité en #HPC (au CNRS dans l’seizième, attention).
http://orap.irisa.fr/52ieme-forum-reproductibilite/

2024-03-14 22:37:29

Full support to the NixOS users who oppose sponsorship from the military-industrial complex in the name of the community:
https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/

2024-03-13 22:35:48

Nice talk on #bootstrapping Nix from Linux + TinyCC:
https://media.ccc.de/v/nixcon-2023-34402-bootstrapping-nix-and-linux-from-tinycc
Includes a demo of a self-reproducible ISO (which is no small feat).

2024-03-13 16:25:02

Une des mes occupations favorites est de lire dehors au soleil.
Bonne nouvelle : toutes les conditions étaient réunies.

2024-01-14 14:24:26

- reply

Also, some of the incentives for “bloat” and disincentives for “lean software design” Wirth describes hold for proprietary software, but not so much for free software.
Yet, free software does suffer from the same problem.
20 years ago I’d run GNU/Linux, X11, Firefox, Emacs, Guile, etc. on my Sun UltraSparc4 (64-bit SPARC!). Would I be able to run modern versions of these things on that machine? I doubt it.
Why is that?
(Linux and Debian dropped SPARC64 years ago anyway.)

2024-01-14 14:17:07

- reply

I sympathize to some extent with the critique of “our recent penchant for friendly user interaction”, insisting that “ease should be based on an underlying concept that makes the use almost intuitive”.
I have a feeling though that Wirth puts too much blame on GUIs. They sure were a significant part of “bloat”, especially back in 1995. But is it still true for the 1995–2024 time frame?

2024-01-14 14:13:24

Wirth’s “Plea for Lean Software” (1995) resonates with me.
https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
The problem is more acute than ever. Sure, there are applications today that couldn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago; and yes, interfaces have improved.
Yet common tasks (messaging, web browsing, document authoring, software development) are not all that different but require much larger amounts of resources.
🧵
https://toot.aquilenet.fr/system/media_attachments/files/111/754/682/722/897/251/original/b8f4bb03052402c5.png

2023-11-11 13:06:42

One of the achievements of the workshop: ~15 people showed up at the install party with their laptop and left with a working installation, and ~70 attended the #Guix intro tutorial and following packaging intro, now knowing enough to get started.
We’re talking about people new to Guix, working in a variety of domains, and who’d often not self-identify as developers.

2023-09-11 07:30:09

- reply

@npub1zae…fpj4 Works for me. Temporary problem maybe?

2023-09-10 20:14:17

Why oh why can’t we have a viable Git library? 😢
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/65720#6

2023-08-13 17:42:24

me: “Do you know what ‘shell’ means in English?”
kid: “Yes! It’s like in ‘guix shell supertuxkart’!”
🤦