It turns out to be hard to explain why I'm so excited about this, but I am very excited by Ludo's wip-service-refactor Guix branch.

But here's the short of it: imagine you had a UI to configure a system, and you wanted a user to be able to just select "oh I want MediaGoblin installed, and I want pump.io installed, and here's my domain name, and blah blah blah..." but MediaGoblin and Pump.IO both need to share their configuration with nginx or apache, and both of them require a mail transfer agent to be set up, but the user shouldn't have to re-define configuration in multiple places... the user shouldn't even have to at all, they should just have to fill in a few widgets selecting their configuration and the information about the config should propagate.

This is one of the design requirements I had when I started on Opstimal before I realized helping the Guix project fulfilled my goals more clearly. I'm excited to see that it looks like it will be possible in Guix land as well.