Subject: [bug#57963] [PATCH v4 1/2] home-services: Add base.

From: Andrew Tropin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:50:24 +0400

On 2022-10-02 16:59, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:

> Am Sonntag, dem 02.10.2022 um 22:45 +0900 schrieb Taiju HIGASHI:
>> > Like Liliana wrote, it may be that more of these can be moved from
>> > “essential” to “base”, we can keep that for a later patch.
>> 
>> Please let us address this in a later patch.
>> 
>> I would like to discuss something with you.
>> I'm aware that this patch is a breaking change. We are aware that if
>> we do not add %base-home-services to the existing home configuration,
>> fontconfig will change.  I'm concerned about how the community will
>> react to this.
> As long as the out-of-the-box behaviour stays the same, the community
> has no reason to complain.  For what it's worth, you could also leave
> fontconfig as an essential service, but then you get another field to
> configure.
>
> As far as I see, essential services are also a thing on the system
> side, but the home and system variants have a somewhat different feel
> to them.  

Originially purpose was the same - to have services depending on
home-environment record fields (fontconfig depended on symlink-path
field, which was configurable back in the days), later we made
~/.guix-home hardcoded and did other changes to remove all the
dependencies for essential services from home-environment.  Now the
purpose feels somewhat different, because it basically a good list of
default services, but not actually essential.  The only thing, that
still depends on home-environment fields is home-profile-service-type.

Globally, I'm good with the reorganization of essential services, but
let's make another thread for this issue.

> The fontconfig-service is not actually essential, the profile service
> type arguably isn't either (it acts as yet another profile and
> simultaneously fails to satisfy the multi-profile use-case; more on
> that elsewhere), the xdg-base-directories one notably violates the XDG
> Base Directories specification, and so on.
>
> I'd get Andrew's approval before moving services, but I'd move them in
> one go rather than bit by bit.
>
> Cheers

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin