Re: Emacs interface for Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:

> I think current situation is very confusing to users.  A user can't even
> install any package.  What if he wants to install “guile” from
> “base.scm”?

It’s possible, using ‘guix package -e’ (info "(guix) Invoking guix
package").

I think guix.el should be able to distinguish packages internally, so
that when I choose, say, a specific “guile-2.0.11”, that’s really the
one that gets installed (maybe it already does, I haven’t checked.)

> I strongly believe this is a problem.  You can see the packages that you
> can't install or even worse “guix package --list-installed” may tell you
> that you have several “foo-1.0:out” installed.  Actually when I saw the
> packages with the same name/version the first time, I thought it's a
> bug.

I would say it’s a problem of the distro–i.e., the (gnu packages ...)
modules–if several same-named packages are exposed to the user.  We’ve
discussed several times the problem of having duplicates between
base.scm and other modules, but I haven’t come to a satisfying solution.

So I agree, these specific cases must be addressed somehow.

However, it’s a fundamental feature of the package manager that packages
(really: package records) can be freely created, and that the ‘name’
field is just a hint.  Duplicates should remain rare in practice, but
the UI must be prepared to deal with them IMO.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.