Re: IDEA: Give Our Generations a Name

[Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net>]

"jgart" <jgart@dismail.de> writes:

> Hi Guixers,
>
> What do you think if we would be able to give past generations a name?
>
> I'm thinking of the way you can do the following with git:
>
> git stash -m "My description of this important stash."
>
> I think this would help differentiate slight differences that would be
> hard to tell what the state of that generation was by just looking at
> the differences of profile package content.
>
> to bloat? or not to bloat? that is the question

Since generations are just symlinks to profiles in the store and a
profile can be in multiple generations, this would require wrapping the
profile with some additional metadata.  I guess it's technically as
simple as adding a "dummy" package that just contains the name in a file
in output/etc/generation-name.txt or something, that would get unioned
into the profile, and then it's a simple matter of outputting that info
in --list-generations.
Right?
I would actually like this for system profiles quite a lot.  When you're
working on something like a new file-system or service integration and
have some nondeterministic errors and are trying to track down which
generations reproduce it, it's nice to know in what way generation 24 is
different from generations 15 through 23.
(Also it still sucks that we can't have a single generation with
multiple config variants to choose from at boot, but I digress.)