Subject: Re: bug#38529: Make --ad-hoc the default for guix environment proposed deprecation mechanism

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2019 01:04:08 +0100

Hi Arne,

First, do not take me wrong, I am not "fighting" or not going to an
"heated debate".
I am fine and I hope you are also fine.
As I said my opinion in other emails, I am not repeating here. Well, I
am not convinced it is the good one, but as I trust collective power,
I am sure Guix will find the best consensus. I am even calling since
the very beginning of this discussion to collect opinions from the
other fellow hackers.

Expressing the feelings is better than bitterness. Therefore I express
mines. :-)
I could send that privately because I am not sure it deserves to be
public. But let wash the laundry in family (translation from French
expression ;-))

On Sat, 21 Dec 2019 at 00:02, Arne Babenhauserheide <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > Konrad's example. So, nothing new on the table; except you are
> > starting to throw "feelings" with the "traumatic change" words.
>
> I do not see this as feelings, but as strategy. That’s what the article
> is about: Many small breakages add up, and repeated changes to
> best-practices also add up.

Just to be on the same wavelength, traumatic means in the Collins
Dictionnary: "A 'traumatic' experience is very shocking and upsetting,
and may cause psychological damage."

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/traumatic

Well, to me it could make sense in the context of the mentioned blog.
Even if I feel this very opinionated. Not to say it could hurt me; bah
I am a big boy, that's ok.

Again, to be on the same wavelength, the blog says: "The result has
been hugely divisive and intimately familiar to anyone who works with
Python, creating massive rifts in the community and wasting millions
of hours of engineer time addressing. This kind of “strong” trauma is
fairly easy to spot in advance."

Well, I understand when speaking about Python. Are we comparing the
number of Guix users with the number of Python users? Are we comparing
the number of changes between Python 2 and 3 with the change of the
default "guix environment foo"? And not all the "guix environment"
behaviour, only a specific case.

Ok, maybe we are talking about the other trauma. The blog explains:
"Since nothing has actually broken with this change, the effects are
more subtle than with strong traumatic changes." and then "The
opportunity to solve this problem by rewriting with asyncio in mind,
however, also presents me a chance to rewrite in anything else, and
reevaluate my choice of Python for the project entirely."

I am sorry, I do not understand. I am probably too dumb. On one hand,
the issue of "guix environment" is the very backward compatibility so
are we really talking about this second "trauma"? On the other hand,
because "guix environment" will be better and users probably need to
rethink how they use Guix, then they will fully drop Guix.

Maybe "feelings" (quoting, in citation quoted too) is not the right
word. My point is all is vague. Example: I have the feeling that my
students(*) do not like Scheme; do I need to switch next year to
another language? Then do I make my decision based on my feelings?
based on the feelings of the students who are retaking the year (could
be shocked)? Me, I will make my decision based on: how many students
failed? what do they understand? what could be better for all the
students? what could be a better language? what is the ratio between
the new student vs the retaking ones? how many length the Scheme
textbook is? etc. Well, analogy is just analogy.

Well, that's it. I expressed what it appears to me a trail going
nowhere. Let move forward and put energy in "backward compatibility"
discussion: does Guix want? what does it imply? which level? etc. for
example, your interesting input "GUIX_ENVIRONMENT_STABLE=1".

All the best,
simon

(*) hypothetical, I do not have real students, even if I teach a bit.
And we use Python as introduction to implemented algorithms after 1
year fighting to switch from C. Whatever! :-)