[Bio-packaging] testing out guix

[Ricardo Wurmus]

>> I'm thinking that the mailing list method is foreign to most 
>> bioinformaticians so a github for collating them would be useful, yeh.
>
> I'll see if maybe I can set up a regularly synced github mirror for
> contributors who are uncomfortable with sending patches to the mailing
> list.  (I prefer this method over Github pull requests, but I realise
> others have a different opinion on this.)

Having thought this over again, I think I'd rather not create a mirror
on Github, because I cannot guarantee keeping it up-to-date (considering
my other tasks as a sysadmin) and I don't really want to establish
infrastructure that contributors learn to depend on.

I'm okay with extracting patches from mails to this mailing list,
though, and as your example has shown this actually does work well
enough.  Sending an email is simple and if we can use this mailing list
to curate and polish contributions I'd prefer this over making Github
the de facto place where contributions and reviews take place.  (I'm
much more comfortable with the patch/email-based workflow and I think
it's great that one doesn't need to have a Github account to
participate.)

(As a free software dude and fan of decentralisation I'll also sleep
better if I don't encourage people to run non-free JavaScript in their
browsers and contribute to the development of concentrating all code in
Github ;))

Anyway, for those who are uncomfortable sending patches to the
guix-devel mailing list I don't mind at all to fix formatting and style
problems and turn their email to this list into a proper patch against
Guix upstream.

Happy hacking!

~~ Ricardo