Re: command-not-found

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ben Woodcroft <address@hidden> writes:

> Seeing as guix is becoming more and more complete, it would be great to 
> have 'command-not-found' [1] or similar available, so that typing in the 
> name of an uninstalled binary begets a suggestion on which package(s) to 
> install, like Ubuntu gives:
>
> $ gitk
> The program 'gitk' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
> sudo apt-get install gitk

For the record: I never liked this feature (and the delay it caused) and
I’m not too keen on having something like this for Guix.

> The database for this I imagine could be generated by hydra, no?

It wouldn’t be good to rely on Hydra.  We are trying to encourage
alternative distribution models (via “guix publish” and eventually via
GNUnet), and it would be a step in the opposite direction (in my
opinion) to rely more on Hydra.

If the package expressions themselves contained information about the
contents of their “bin/” directories then it wouldn’t *have* to be
generated by Hydra.

We discussed something similar for identifying what packages contained
certain files.  It is quite ugly, of course, to have a long list of
files produced by the package as part of the tidy package expression, so
I cannot recommend any real alternative to what you suggest.

~~ Ricardo