Re: User-Friendlyness of Guix and non-scaryness, printing messages

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Arun Isaac writes:

>> But I think 'guix package' can be made a lot more user-friendly by not
>> showing the build output (by default).  The summary of what will be
>> installed, and some progress indicator or at least something moving to
>> show the user it's doing something, and eventually the success or
>> failure message is enough.
>
> Is it possible to have `guix package' NOT build from source? I really
> hate it when big packages like icecat, epiphany, or libreoffice start
> building on my machine. It takes about a day for each one of these
> packages to build on my machine, and they generally swap so much into
> HDD, that I can hardly do anything else when building. Because of this
> inconvenience, I keep postponing upgrading my packages.
>
> Also, sometimes having to "--fallback" to building source is such a
> pain. I think the end user needs a Debian-like experience (or like other
> conventional non-source distros) where they can ALWAYS download the
> latest packages from the repos.

There's a bug I opened about adding an --only-substitutes option:
  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=26608

Ludo seems to support it, so I guess really someone just needs to
implement it.  It would result in a lot less churn for a lot of us :)