Re: Emacs interface for Guix

[Alex Kost]

Ludovic Courtès (2014-07-19 20:28 +0400) wrote:

> Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:
>
> [...]
>
>> Also I have a question: is there such thing as “obsolete package”?
>> AFAIU after ‘guix pull’, a user can still have old versions of packages
>> installed that don't exist in the new guix anymore.  I.e. after that
>> some packages from the current manifest cannot be found with
>> ‘(find-packages-by-name "foo" "<old-version>")’.  Am I right?
>
> Yes.  Thus, for such packages, the UI would be unable to display the
> details.
>
> Actually, more generally, there is little meta-data about installed
> packages, compared to available packages.  The UI can assume that an
> installed package called ‘guile-2.0.11’ is probably the same as an
> available package with the same name and version, but that’s not
> necessarily the case.
>
> It’s possible to check whether they really are the same by computing the
> derivation of the available package and comparing its output directory
> names to those of the installed package.
>
> So ideally the UI would show a little warning when it knows it doesn’t
> match.
>
> (Am I clear?)

Yes, that's what concerned me since the very beginning – unique entities
should have unique identifiers, i.e. ideally there should be an
easy-to-get ID for every package.  But as I'm using a non-unique
‘name-version’ spec to "identify" a package, information about installed
outputs is displayed for every matching package.  You may look at:

  M-x guix-search-by-name guile-2.0.11

to see how it looks like in a “list” and especially “info” buffers
currently (I have updated the repo).

Also I made some changes for augmenting paths, so please report if
something does not work.