Re: Guix - installation script

[Christopher Baines]

On Sun, 27 Aug 2017 23:36:17 +0100
Christopher Baines <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 21:51:12 +0100
> Hellseher <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > That's great, thank you!
> > 
> > I'll go through all suggestions and make required changes as soon
> > as possible.
> > 
> > Do you want to move that script to separate stand along repository
> > to make it easy for other to review it?  
> 
> What might work well is for you to send the whole script to guix-devel
> in an email. Then people can read through and review it.
> 
> I'll try to make some time to review and test this in the coming week.

I've tried running this in a Debian VM, and I've nearly managed to get
Guix installed.

From my experience, I've got some suggestions for the script.

Firstly, I see this as installing GNU Guix, not GuixSD, as I understand
GuixSD to be an operating system, and this script won't install an OS,
just Guix within your existing operating system.

For the ascii art, I tweaked it by removing the SD, and adding some
separation between the i and x to make it more readable.
   _____ _   _ _    _     _____       _
  / ____| \ | | |  | |   / ____|     (_)
 | |  __|  \| | |  | |  | |  __ _   _ _ __  __
 | | |_ | . ` | |  | |  | | |_ | | | | |\ \/ /
 | |__| | |\  | |__| |  | |__| | |_| | | >  <
  \_____|_| \_|\____/    \_____|\__,_|_|/_/\_\


Just requiring one of curl and wget would be good, either by removing
the need to use curl (it wasn't on the Debian system I was testing
with), or making it possible to use either would work.

I think the requirement on which could be removed by using the bash
builtin type.

Also, for checking dependencies, currently when it fails, the entire
script stops as command exits with a status of 1. Something like this
would work though:

       if ! command -v "$c" &>/dev/null; then
           warn+=("$c")
       fi

I think running guix package -i at the end might be a bit too much.
Maybe it would be better to suggest running a less permanent command,
e.g. guix environment --ad-hoc hello -- hello, and directing them to
IRC or the mailing list if they have problems?

Thanks again for writing this :)

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