Re: Preparing for an alpha release

[Nikita Karetnikov <nikita.karetnikov@gmail.com>]

> things related to command-line tools, such as options documented and
> not implemented in ‘guix-package’;

I'd like to implement '--roll-back' and '--search'.

Questions:

scheme@(guile-user)> ,use (guix-package)
scheme@(guile-user)> %current-profile
$1 = "/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile"
scheme@(guile-user)> %profile-directory
$2 = "/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root"
scheme@(guile-user)> %user-environment-directory
$3 = "/root/.guix-profile"

'ls' doesn't list the above. Why?

# ls -a /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/
.  ..  channels  channels-1-link
# ls -a /root
.   .aptitude      .bashrc  .gitconfig  .nix-channels  .profile
..  .bash_history  .cache   .gnupg      .nix-defexpr

How should '--roll-back' work? Does Guix support multiple profiles?

Nix uses the following scheme. [1]

# ls /nix/var/nix/profiles/
default          default-2-link  default-5-link  default-8-link
default-10-link  default-3-link  default-6-link  default-9-link
default-1-link   default-4-link  default-7-link  per-user

What function should be used to access the pointee of 'guix-profile'?

I assume that it should work like this:

1. Get the pointee of 'guix-profile'.

2. Parse the name of the pointee.

3. Decrement the number and save that as '%current-profile'.

Should 'guix-package' also support '--switch-generation',
'--list-generations', and '--switch-profile'? [1]

How to implement '--search'?

One option is to wrap around 'nix-env --search', but there are two
problems with this approach:

1. I don't know how to call it from Guile.

2. We don't want to depend on 'nix-env', do we?

I apologize if my questions sound naive, but I still have a vague
understanding of the internals.

Nikita

[1] http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3488542/download/1/manual/#sec-profiles