Re: Improving the usability of 'guix environment'

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> David Thompson <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> I'm a bit confused about that.  Are you suggesting we merge 'guix
>> environment' into 'guix package'?
>
> A possibility might be to:
>
>   • keep ‘guix environment’ as is; after all, ‘guix environment emacs’
>     really reads as “the environment for [the development of] Emacs”;

After thinking about this more, I agree.

It seems that the real problem here is that using a string for the
'source' field of a package doesn't yield a buildable package, which
makes me feel like writing a package to encompass the dependencies is
just useless boilerplate.  If that was fixed, not only could you make an
environment from it, you could also easily pass it to 'guix build' or
'guix package', making it very useful.

>   • add a -E option to ‘guix package’ (like the -E of ‘guix
>     environment’).
>
> Example:
>
>   # start a shell where guile and guile-sdl are available in addition to
>   # what’s in ~/.guix-profile
>   $ guix package -i guile guile-sdl -E $SHELL
>
>   # start a shell where only guile and guile-sdl are available
>   $ guix package -i guile guile-sdl --scratch -E $SHELL
>
>   # start a shell in an environment which is my profile minus emacs
>   # plus vim and with an upgraded zile
>   $ guix package -r emacs -i vim -u zile --pure -E $SHELL
>
> Hmm.
>
> I’ve not completely convinced myself.
>
> Maybe keeping it in ‘guix environment’ is wiser.  I’m not quite sure
> that changing the default behavior is desirable though.

I think keeping the functionality in 'guix environment' is the best
idea, but I'm going to hold off on adding a feature like this for now.
It might not be necessary at all.

Thanks for thinking this through with me!

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
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