Demystifying complex configurations

Very nice. I have been struggling just a little with define-configuration in recent weeks, with finally getting things right today! I would have moved faster had this post come sooner. Excellent writeup!

Nice intro. The article is already long as is, so I understand why they didn't include it, but I'd with they cover other concerns like how to test the configuration code.

Another potential improvement for the guix API is to include serialzier for common formats likes YAML, TOML, ini. RDE has pioneered some of the work.

Another pain point I ran into while working on a git home configuration is how to avoid including empty files. Because the files are normally using gexps (mixed-text-file), which evaluate the code inside the guix daemon, it is not something one can check at build time easily. fwict the approach is to check the inputs of the files themselves. e.j. This is what the shell home services use.

Note that for more programs that follow the XDG standard one can extend the home-xdg-configuration-files-service-type to place the configuration files in ~/.local/config.