Re: The future of 'guix environment'

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello David,

thanks for your thoughts!

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 09:22:13AM -0400, Thompson, David wrote:
> As an avid Emacs user, I want to do everything in Emacs, but if I want
> to use, say, M-x compile but in the context of my development
> environment, I have to wrap the command in 'guix environment' and now
> everything takes way longer because Guix wastes tons of time talking
> to the daemon to build a profile that I know already exists.   This
> goes hand in hand with the previous issue.  We need a cache.

From the remainder of your message, I get the impression that exactly one
environment is cached?

As Leo, I use "guix environment" only ephemerally, as "guix environment foo"
when I quickly want to build or work on package foo (which, most of the
time, equals "guix"...). So an option of no cache would be nice as well.

On the other hand, could there be several cached environments?
Numbered or otherwise identified, for people who alternate between two
different projects? Would this be an interesting use case?

> The default behavior of 'guix environment foo' creating an environment
> with the *dependencies* of the package 'foo' seemed like a good idea
> at the time (it's what nix-shell did, after all), but most of the time
> when I define throwaway environments on the command-line (as opposed
> to a guix.scm file) I *always* use the --ad-hoc flag.  Using the
> packages themselves rather than the dependencies should be the
> default.

Indeed, before getting used to it, I found this behaviour very counter-
intuitive, so I like the new defaults you suggest, with reversed command
line flags.

Andreas